Facilitating information system development with Panoramic view on data

TL;DR

This paper introduces Panorama, a data visualization tool that simplifies information system development by enabling users to define data vocabularies and traverse data associations without extensive programming, thus reducing development time.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach using context and focus visualization for object recognition, facilitating data-oriented software development with minimal technical skills.

Findings

Development time reduced by up to 25%

Effective for data-oriented problem domains

Simplifies data traversal without programming knowledge

Abstract

The increasing amount of information and the absence of an effective tool for assisting users with minimal technical knowledge lead us to use associative thinking paradigm for implementation of a software solution - Panorama. In this study, we present object recognition process, based on context + focus information visualization techniques, as a foundation for realization of Panorama. We show that user can easily define data vocabulary of selected domain that is furthermore used as the application framework. The purpose of Panorama approach is to facilitate software development of certain problem domains by shortening the Software Development Life Cycle with minimizing the impact of implementation, review and maintenance phase. Our approach is focused on using and updating data vocabulary by users without extensive programming skills. Panorama therefore facilitates traversing through data by following associations where user does not need to be familiar with the query language, the data structure and does not need to know the problem domain fully. Our approach has been verified by detailed comparison to existing approaches and in an experiment by implementing selected use cases. The results confirmed that Panorama fits problem domains with emphasis on data oriented rather than ones with process oriented aspects. In such cases the development of selected problem domains is shortened up to 25%, where emphasis is mainly on analysis, logical design and testing, while omitting physical design and programming, which is performed automatically by Panorama tool.