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New England Database Society sponsored by Sun Microsystems |
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NEDS |
Visionary: A Next Generation Visualization System for Data bases
Michael Stonebraker
MIT
Peter Richardson
Rocket Software
275 Grove St., Newton, Mass.
Friday, March 28, 2003, 4:00 PM
Volen 101, Brandeis University
(preceded by a wine and cheese reception at 3:00 pm)
Abstract:
Visionary was originally written as the Tioga / DataSplash system at Berkeley in the mid 1990's. After commercialization by Illustra, two rewrites by Informix, and a brief ownership by IBM, it is now being enhanced and marketed by Rocket Software.
This talk will present the key features of Visionary, a very sophisticated presentation system for ODBC and JDBC data sources. Visionary shows the result of a query on an arbitrary-sized canvas. The end user controls a viewer, which is a certain elevation above the canvas, and which can be freely panned in all directions. There are multiple query wizards, which help a user specify a query. The most elegant ones resembles Query-by-example. There are nearly 20 display templates, each controlled by a wizard, including scatter plot, organization chart, pie chart, 2-dimensional map, etc. These can be nested to form complex presentations; for example, a pie chart of plant output by product type can be positioned on a geographic map at the (X, Y) co-ordinate position of the plant.
In Visionary, the viewer can be zoomed in and out. Zooming in shows a smaller area of the canvas, while zooming out does the converse. Visionary supports the notion of layers. Hence, at high elevation, an employee could be viewed as a dot on a geographic map; at lower elevation, he could morph into a picture and then into a historical graph of his salary versus time.
Even more powerful is the Visionary notion of wormholes. Canvases can have holes in them, through which other canvases (behind the current one) are visible. The viewer is merely a greater distance above the partially hidden canvas than the one in front of it. Canvases can be arbitrarily nested, and the user can navigate between canvases by going through wormholes.
This talk will show several Visionary demo applications, as well present Visionary Studio, the drag-and-drop, wizard-oriented development environment.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Mike Stonebraker is Adjunct Professor in the Laboratory of Computer Science at MIT, having previously served as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley where he joined in 1971. He is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost experts in database technology. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Princeton University and Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Michigan. He founded Ingres Corp. in 1980 and served on the company's board of directors until 1993. (Ingres Corp. was purchased by Computer Associates in 1994.) INGRES, the company's primary product, was a commercialization of his research in relational database management systems (RDBMS) at Berkeley. He also founded Illustra Information Technologies, Inc. which commercialized his research in object-relational database technology (Postgres), and Cohera which commercialized his research in distributed database systems (Mariposa). For the past two years, his research has focused on data stream management systems in the context of the Aurora project.
Peter Richardson leads the Visionary development team at Rocket Software. Prior to joining Rocket in 2000, he served as the Director of Engineering at SystemSoft where he co-invented self-healing technology that was widely shipped by PC OEMs before its acquisition by Microsoft in early 2000. Peter has over thirteen years experience developing software products for both the consumer and enterprise markets. He earned a BSEE with highest honors from the Royal Naval Engineering College in Plymouth, England and graduated valedictorian in his MBA program at Boston College.
Maintained by Dina Goldin dqg AT cse.uconn.edu
Last updated on 03/24/03