A web services architecture for visualization

Service-oriented architectures are increasingly being used as the architectural style for creating large distributed computer applications. This paper examines the provision of visualization as a service that can be made available to application designers in order to combine with other services. We develop a three-layer architecture: a client layer which provides the user interface; a stateful web service middleware layer which provides a published interface to the visualization system; and finally, a visualization component layer which provides the core functionality of visualization techniques. This separation of middleware from the visualization components is crucial: it allows us to exploit the strengths of web service technologies in providing standardized access to the system, and in maintaining state information throughout a session, but also gives us the freedom to build our visualization layer in an efficient and flexible way without the constraints of web service protocols. We describe the design of a visualization service based on this architecture, and illustrate one aspect of the work by re-visiting an early example of web-based visualization.