Service-oriented approach to collaborative visualization

This paper presents a new service-oriented approach to the design and implementation of visualization systems in a Grid computing environment. The approach evolves the traditional dataflow visualization system, based on processes communicating via shared memory or sockets, into an environment in which visualization Web services can be linked in a pipeline using the subscription and notification services available in Globus Toolkit 4. A specific aim of our design is to support collaborative visualization, allowing a geographically distributed research team to work collaboratively on visual analysis of data. A key feature of the system is the use of a formal description of the visualization pipeline, using the skML language first developed in the gViz e-science project. This description is shared by all collaborators in a session. In co-operation with the e-Viz project, we generate user interfaces for the visualization services automatically from the skML description. The new system is called NoCoV (Notification-service-based Collaborative Visualization). A simple prototype has been built and is used to illustrate the concepts.