VisGap2025 - The Gap between Visualization Research and Visualization Software

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/3607195

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Browsing VisGap2025 - The Gap between Visualization Research and Visualization Software by Title

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    Beyond the Prototype: Challenges of Long-Term Integration of Visual Analytics in Civic Spaces
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Jasim, Mahmood; Mahyar, Narges; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
    Despite the recognized benefits of visual analytics systems in supporting data-driven decision-making, their deployment in realworld civic contexts often faces significant barriers. Beyond technical challenges such as resource constraints and development complexity, sociotechnical factors-including organizational hierarchies, misalignment between designers and stakeholders, and concerns around technology adoption hinder their sustained use. In this work, we reflect on our collective experiences of designing, developing, and deploying visual analytics systems in the civic domain and discuss challenges across design and adoption aspects. We emphasize the need for deeper integration strategies, equitable stakeholder engagement, and sustainable implementation frameworks to bridge the gap between research and practice.
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    Challenges in the Development, Distribution, and Maintenance of Software Visualization Tools in Biology and Medicine
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Shah, Michael D.; Qiu, Sherry; Walter, Thomas; Rushmeier, Holly; Blenman, Kim R.M.; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
    Software visualizations remain and will continue to serve as an important tool for domain scientists in order to advance, communicate, and investigate science. In this paper, we present our findings on a case study of the challenges involved with specialized visualization software. Through this case study, we provide insights into why building software and tools for scientists is challenging. We provide several recommendations at the end of our work in order to progress forward the ability to improve software quality when developing critical software visualization tools in domains such as biology and medicine. Key Learnings: For tools that require integration and/or implementation of multiple programming languages 1) start early with the development on all target platforms and 2) look for where to reimplement a function rather than bring in code with many extraneous dependencies.
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    Extensible TensorFlow Implementations of Projection Quality Metrics
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Machado, Alister; Behrisch, Michael; Telea, Alexandru; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
    Dimensionality Reduction (DR, also called Projection) algorithms enable the exploration of high-dimensional data by generating low-dimensional representations of it - typically 2D or 3D scatterplots. Such representations are designed to map data patterns to visual patterns analyzable by humans. Projections can vary wildly - even for a fixed dataset - depending on technique and hyperparameters chosen and, as such, do not all preserve all data patterns equally well. To assess this, so-called Projection Quality Metrics (PQMs) are used. However, the ever-growing number of Projection Quality Metrics has led to fragmented implementations which hinder their easy reuse, leading in turn to unequal adoption and inconsistent implementations. In this work, we propose a TensorFlow-based library of PQMs, improving the previous state of the art in terms of ergonomics, extensibility, and computational scalability. We discuss our improvements and elicit areas where the gap between implementation and research is significant in the area of Projection Quality Metrics, pointing to avenues for future work in developing better PQM libraries that aim to fill this gap.
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    InfraVis - The Swedish Research Infrastructure for Visualization Support
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Weinkauf, Tino; Romero, Mario; Besançon, Lonni; Ahlstedt, Jonas; Berendt, Filip; Billger, Monica; Danielsson, Karin; Davies, Melvyn B.; Filipsson, Helena; Gelfgren, Stefan; Kerren, Andreas; Larsson, Emanuel; Latino, Fabio; Liliequist, Evelina; Nyström, Ingela; Paulsson, Kajsa; Podkorytova, Maria; Pirzamanbein, Behnaz; Sjöström, Mårten; Sopasakis, Alexandros; Thuresson, Björn; Westin, Jonathan; Ynnerman, Anders; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
    Essentially all academic research of today relies on analysis of data from a wide range of sources. Several underpinning, and rapidly developing, technologies are supporting the analysis of this data. Visualization serves as an interface to this ecosystem of tools and methods and integrates them into environments supporting scientific workflows, effectively sharing cognitive load between computers and humans. There is, however, a gap between the state-of-the-art in visual data analysis and current wide-spread academic practice. Support for the introduction of new, improved and tailored, visual data analysis environments thus has the potential to address challenges involving large and complex data, creating competitive advantages for researchers. To fill the gap and capitalize on this opportunity, the InfraVis initiative has been created in Sweden with the mission to operate an infrastructure consisting of visualization experts, software solutions, and access to high-end visualization laboratories. Users of InfraVis are offered assistance through a national helpdesk with rapid response times as well as more in-depth projects addressing specific data and software challenges. InfraVis provides software solutions based on development within connected research groups, curation of international software and best practice, and user training in the form of courses, seminars and on-line documentation. To build an infrastructure with national coverage, we have pooled together nine visualization environments in Sweden interconnected in a nodal structure. The nodes are hosted in proximity to research environments in visualization, which enables direct access to the research front as well as to state-of-art facilities. The governance structure of InfraVis is based on the leading researchers in visualization in Sweden as well as an international advisory board.
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    VisGap 2025: Frontmatter
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas