Using Scientific Visualization Systems to Automate Monitoring of Data Generated by Lightweight Programmable Electronic Devices

This paper is devoted to a unified approach to monitoring data generated by various electronic devices that are based on programmable microcontrollers. We suggest that communication between visualization systems and target devices be automatically tuned by retrieving the description of the input/output data structure from the firmware of the devices. For this purpose, we propose an ontology-based generator of firmware parsers. In our approach, the ontology that describes the syntax of input/output statements of different programming languages and the generator of firmware parsers become an essential part of the visualization system. Next, we propose to enrich the visualization pipeline with a data filtering stage. To make the filtering and rendering stages highly configurable, we use data flow diagrams (DFDs) that define data transformation. To enable the user to compose these diagrams, we develop a special high-level graphical editor. The description of DFD nodes is stored in the ontological knowledge base of the visualization system. To specify the nodes in ontological notation, we use ontologies of semantic filters, visual objects, and graphical scenes. We implement the proposed approach in the SciVi multiplatform client-server scientific visualization system and test its new capabilities by monitoring the orientation and light direction sensors.