37. WebViz: A Web-Based Collaborative Interactive Visualization System for Large-Scale Data Sets

We have created a web-based system for multi-user collaborative interactive visualization of large data sets (on the order of terabytes) that allows users in different locations to simultaneously and collectively perform visualizations over the Internet. By leveraging an asynchronous java and XML (AJAX) web development pattern via the Google Web Toolkit (http://​code.​google.​com/​webtoolkit/​), we are able to provide remote users a web portal to the University of Minnesota’s Laboratory for Computational Sciences and Engineering’s large-scale interactive visualization system that provides high resolution visualizations to the order of 15 million pixels. Our web application, known as WebViz (for Web-based Visualization System), provides visualization services “in the cloud” and is accessible via a range of devices including netbooks, smartphones, and other web-and JavaScript-enabled mobile devices. This paper will detail the history of the project as well as the current version of WebViz including a discussion of its implementation and system architecture. We will also discuss features, future goals, and our plans for increasing scalability of the system, which includes a discussion of the benefits potentially, afforded us by a migration of server-side components to the Google Application Engine (http://​code.​google.​com/​appengine/​).