Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
14.4.6 Searching to build applications
Once the data are held within the index, they can be searched simply
using either the RESTful HTTP interface, or using standard APIs
developed for JAVA and other programming languages.
There are a number of systems that use the data, ranging from systems
developed alongside third parties (e.g. KOL Miner), to Pipeline Pilot
scripts and Excel spreadsheets that have been developed to interface with
the Publications Index for specifi c purposes for individual scientists.
Typically, many of our approaches use visualisation technologies to
present the data in a more meaningful way back to the business users.
14.5 Visualisation technologies
Several commercial alternatives for building interactive, information
visualisation systems have been evaluated. A thorough comparison
against a variety of platforms demonstrated that open source alternatives
tended to have at least as rich a set of features for data modelling,
visualisation and interaction as well as layout and encoding techniques.
More importantly, the frequently active community continued to improve
and grow the options, often resulting in many examples that could be
relatively quickly deployed and customised for business applications.
There are a variety of open source visualisation technologies including
Visualisation Toolkit (VTK), Prefuse, Flare, Simile, Java Universal
Network Graph (JUNG), InfoVis, yFiles, HCIL and AXIIS; each with
their differences and unique features.
The visualisations that are described today focus predominantly
around the utility of Prefuse [5], although our group has build systems
using Flex, Flare and Simile, as well as commercial offerings such as Flex.
14.6 Prefuse visualisation toolkit
Prefuse is a Java-based toolkit providing a set of libraries for rich
visualisations, including network diagrams, heat maps and trees. It is
licensed under the terms of a BSD license and can be used freely for
commercial and non-commercial purposes.
The online Prefuse gallery provides a great overview of approaches
that can be considered. Figure 14.2 highlights some approaches that have
been piloted.
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