Parallel coordinates and scatter plots

This page exists to discuss the design and implementation of parallel coordinate and scatter plot views in ParaView.

The main issue at this point appears to be how to handle client-server interactions.

Literature Survey

• Artero, de Oliveira, Levkowitz. "Uncovering Clusters in Crowded Parallel Coordinates Visualizations," in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2004, Austin, TX. Oct. 10-12, 2004
• Blaas, Botha, and Post. "Extensions of Parallel Coordinates for Interactive Exploration of Large Multi-Timepoint Data Sets," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 1436-1451, November/December, 2008. E-mail dfeng@sandia.gov or dcthomp@sandia.gov for a copy; it is not freely available.
• Fua, Ward, and Rundensteiner. "Hierarchical Parallel Coordinates for Exploration of Large Datasets," in Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '99, pp. 43-50. Oct 24-29, 1999.
• Hauser, Ledermann, and Doleisch. "Angular Brushing of Extended Parallel Coordinates," in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, pp. 127ff, 2002
• Novotný and Hauser. "Outlier-Preserving Focus+Context Visualization in Parallel Coordinates," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 893-900, September-October, 2006

Design alternatives

• Draw the tuples directly
• Draw histograms
• Draw histograms plus some tuples

Benchmark Implementations

• David Feng's current parallel coordinates implementation
  • Located at https://www.kitware.com/svn/vtkSNL/trunk/vtkSNL/Examples/Cxx/ParallelCoordinates
  • Uses View/Representation framework
  • Draws tuples directly as lines
• Julien Finet's upcoming scatter plot implementation
• David Thompson's old parallel coordinates + scatter plot implementation
  • Uses GLUT/OpenGL directly (no VTK) and only really tested on Linux (occasionally on MacOS X)
  • Draws tuples directly as lines or points
  • Interaction via heretofore undocumented methods:
    • Space bar: animate transition from parallel coords to scatter plots
    • Drag/drop: axis positioning/reordering
    • Page up/down: highlight a tuple
    • 'E' key: evenly space axes
    • Click-drag below plot: scrub transition from parallel coords to scatter plots
  • Email dcthomp@sandia.gov for a tarball.