This project will demonstrate that creativity enhancing tools developed initially for advanced integration of computer technology with the performing and visual arts can be effectively oriented towards demanding scientific visualization applications. Field is a software development tool developed and used by the digital art collective the OpenEnded Group in collaboration with several noted choreographers and visual artists in the integration of advanced computer technology and the performing arts. Field is a meta-authoring environment. It is an open-source programming environment that has been architected in such a way to support interdisciplinary projects that call upon domain-specific tools, libraries, and languages that has a minimal core and a powerful plug-in system. Field was created in the context of widely divergent interdisciplinary projects; its aim is to give its users not only the ability to work rapidly, but to shape their Field environment extensively and flexibly for their own demands.
In this project Field software development environment will be amended to support data visualization research from the Tetherless World Constellation group in collaboration with the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This project will benefit scientists, digital artists, and humanity scholars. Scientists will gain a powerful tool for the dissemination of scientific and technological information in areas of vital interest and thus of benefiting the public at large. By enabling better visualizations of very large-data sets, the project will help make those data-sets far more accessible and comprehensible to citizens. Since Field makes it far easier to create interactive visualizations, citizens may actively explore these complex models rather than passively receive a pre-selected set of results. Digital artists will gain a tool that provides new subject areas and canvas for making works that incorporate very large data-sets such as those of interest to the sciences and humanities including economics, scientific, demographics, medical and environmental.
This project added key capabilities to a unified authoring environment, Field, for the visualization of large data sets across disciplines. 1. Field was ported to Linux , with the port merged back into the main Field codebase so that Linux tracks features as they are added to the OS X version. This has expanded Field’s user base, who have taken it upon themselves to create installable Linux packages and tutorials. 2. Javascript extensions were added to Field to provide Field users with a complete development environment for the authorship of online visualizations. Field also unweaves two parts of the Linked Open Government Data (LOGD) project — LOGD’s sophisticated triple store access point, and LOGD demonstrations as a RDF-to-visualization specific JSON representation server. This latter part of LOGD is subsumed into Field, which (as an online tutorial shows) allows the "LOGD demo author" to interactively manipulate the RDF to JSON part of the "server" while programming the Javascript browser "client." 3. A high-level chart drawing system, together with a complete revision of Field’s graphics system, were implemented in Field’s graphics API so that users can rapidly generate standard visualizations such as charts and graphs. Field also enables them to display such graphs in 3D and to animate transitions between graph states. 4. Users may now embed web content directly into Field’s graphics system, which in turn enables them to render material connected to semantic web visualizations but that is represented online in traditional HTML as well as to incorporate material drawn using existing online data visualization APIs. These advances were supported by extensive new documentation and tutorials on Field’s website (www.openendedgroup.com/field). Users may find in-depth tutorials that, among other things, show how to duplicate and optimize the RelFinder system for visualizing semantic web data; how to use Field to generate visualizations within web browsers; and how to run forced directed graph layout algorithms in GPU-accelerated versions. Outreach efforts included workshops and lectures at such places as MIT, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago; presentations at the IEEE symposium of Large-Scale Data Analysis and Visualization and at the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting.
