Monday, August 31, 2009

VisuMap 3.0 Released

Today we have released VisuMap 3.0. This is a major upgrade from the previous version 2.7.

The main change in this release is the implementation of the Atlas service. An atlas in VisuMap 3.0 is frame-less window that enables users to organize and compose data views of different types. The following picture shows the snapshot of a sample atlas:


Atlas service in VisuMap is thus similar as dashboard service in some other visualization centric software applications. It allows users to group visual information according to the subject instead of information type itself. And more importantly for VisuMap users, atlas service enables users to combine multiple algorithms to generate and compose heterogeneously structured information visualization. For instance, this release includes a script (PartitionAtlas.js) that automatically partitions a dataset in several clusters, and generates various maps for each cluster.

Together with this release we have extensive updated the scripting interface. Unfortunately, some old scripts may need minor adjustments to convert to this new release. We have also extended the data format extensively to accommodate the new service. However, the data format has kept compatible in the sense that old dataset files can be loaded into new version, but datasets of new format can not be read by previous versions.

Click the following image to watch a short video that shows how to create an atlas interactively:



Here is another video that shows how a script uses kmean algorithm to partition a dataset and generate different data views for the partitions.

This video shows using pre-configured SOG cluster to create mutiple data views for a dataset.