[vtkusers] InfoVis Provenance Patterns

[Jeff Baumes]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 8:43 AM, Jason BELLONE <JBELLONE at unog.ch> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> We are hoping to promote VTK for mainstream use within our organization as a
> platform for information visualization of global issues. Noting the recent
> developments of Titan in the areas of geovis and infovis, we see great
> potential for applications in our typical analysis use cases. Our task is to
> create a set of "provenance" patterns for conventional representations such
> as choropleth map, 3d bubble plot, social network, etc. We are currently
> using VisTrails to create these "recipes" to enable our non-technical
> user-base to select among the examples. This is the idea, but here is the
> problem. It seems that detailed documentation and examples for the
> infovis/geovis packages could benefit from some "real-life" test cases. For
> example, here is the current scenario we are working with:
>
> a.) A world country border geometry provided as shapefile.
> b.) A CSV delimited file with Country ID (matching shapefile) and
> statistical information such as Population, GDP, etc.
> c.) A render of country polygons (based on SHP) where each country polygon
> is colored (choropleth) based on a statistical parameter.
> d.) A symbol marker (such as proportional cube) is placed on map based on
> statistical variable.
>
> We would be very grateful for this community's indulgence to brainstorm and
> elaborate the VTK implementation of such a case. We are hoping your inputs
> can provide some needed guidance (pseudo code) for us to assemble the needed
> VTK logic.

This is a good use case to flex VTK's geospatial view. I'd start with
the code in Geovis/Testing/Cxx/TestGeoView.cxx for the basic view with
a background image (or TestGeoView2D.cxx if you are interested in a 2D
map). Then you can add more geometry in lat/long coordinates using
vtkSurfaceRepresentation. I'm not sure of the filters required to take
the table and shapefiles and create filled polygons of the appropriate
colors, or if a custom filter is appropriate. vtkGlyphFilter may be
able to create boxes with size proportional to a variable at the
country center (found with vtkCellCenters).

> If it would be useful, we would be happy to "give back" this work and
> provide detailed documentation for using VTK for these scenarios. In other
> words, we'd be happy to share what we learn by contributing instructional
> sources (wiki write-ups, etc.) for using VTK/Titan for common information
> visualization purposes.

Great. You can start at

http://www.sandia.gov/Titan/

and

http://www.kitware.com/InfovisWiki/index.php/Main_Page

if you have not discovered these pages already. It would be great to
update this wiki (and/or the VTK wiki) with any new material you
develop.

> Thank you kindly for your support and advice.

We'll gladly give it as we can.

Jeff