Scalable Representation - Scientific Visualization: Uncertainty, Multifield, Biomedical, and Scalable Visualization - page 355

Chapter 30
Scalable Representation

Yun Jang

Abstract Although the amount and variety of data being generated is increased
dramatically, the capabilities of data visualization, analysis, and discovery solutions
have not been improved accordingly with the explosive rate of data production. One
reason is that storage and processing at the level of raw data require supercomputer
scale resources. The other is that working at the level of raw data prevents effective
human comprehension while exploring and solving most problems. Here we show
several approaches to scalable functional representations. Encoding, abstraction, and
analysis at multiple scales of representations are a common approach in many scien-
tific disciplines and provides a promising approach to harness our expanding digital
universe.

30.1 Functional Representations

Scalable functional representations have been studied in many research areas in order
to interpolate, approximate, and abstract data.Many disciplines no longer explore raw
data, but functionally derived and processed information from the rawdata. Examples
include CT and MRI images in medical applications, and the derived high-level
products fromremote sensing data. Common techniques for functional representation
include radial basis functions, wavelets, and spherical harmonics. The nature of this
functional representation is to find functions hierarchically, therefore, it is possible
to represent data from abstract to detail levels according to compression ratio and
level of detail. The abstract level of the representation allows us to visualize large
data interactively, whereas, the detail level requires more computational power for
the visualization. Moreover it is a unified representation regardless of data formats.
Details of the functional representations are presented as follows.

( B )
Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA
e-mail: [e-mail]
Y. J a n g
Sejong University, Seoul, South Korea

Y. J a n g