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Novel Visualization & Display Technologies
Data visualization and data sharing are essential parts of any data analysis project. A number of obstacles, however, make achieving effective data visualization and sharing particularly challenging: the division of complex large scale projects among autonomous teams; the sophistication of decision, design, and analysis software used by these teams; and the closed architectures and data repositories that are common among these supporting software tools. The central problem is not necessarily that the data generated by these tools is inaccessible, but that the semantic content of this data (i.e., the information itself) is generally not accessible to other (human or computer) agents in the organization. Typically, this is because data is not very good at describing itself or representing its meaning in a way that is accessible.
A complex representation (e.g., a data model or a business process model) carries the information in virtue of some established, systematic connection between the components of the representation and the real world. It is this connection that determines the semantic content of the data being represented. Typically, however, the semantic rules of a representation system for a given application and the semantic intentions of the application designers are not advertised or in any way accessible to other agents in the organization. This makes it difficult, even impossible, for such agents to determine the semantic content of a database: i.e., semantic inaccessibility.
The challenge is to access the semantics of enterprise data across different contexts and provide accurate interpretation of the data by agents outside the data's immediate context. Without this ability, the kind of coordination between enterprise teams necessary for a truly integrated environment is not possible. The use of novel visualization mechanisms is a critical technology enabler for addressing the semantic inaccessibility challenge.
KBSI has developed a number of technologies for providing quality data visualization over the past two decades. The RampMap® toolkit, for example, was developed for Tinker Air Force Base as a means for providing digital asset visualization and management of repair facilities, ramp sites, and equipment. KBSI’s Predictive and Preventive Maintenance Expert System (PPMES) is being used by the Corpus Christi Army Depot to monitor, diagnose, and analyze preventative maintenance action data and to provide on-line monitoring of CCAD mission-critical sensory data. In the ongoing Hybrid Framework for Information Visualization Enablers (HI-FIVE) effort, KBSI is developing novel, model-driven, ontology-centric, standards-based data visualization generation for information portals. HI-FIVE leverages the (DoD-standard) IDEF family of methods, web-services, and a proven data display format called Data Display Markup Language (DDML), also developed by KBSI.
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