The Visual Beans Project

Introduction

Visualisation is growing in importance, extending far beyond the boundaries of scientific and engineering visualisation to information visualisation in general. Computer support for collaboration is also increasingly important and offers significant opportunities for fostering new styles of collaboration rather than replacements for existing styles. Visualisation is itself essentially a collaborative technique, enabling comparisons between data from different sources, etc. Our vision of the future is that collaborators should be able to join collaborative working sessions in a flexible way, in particular supported by automated adaptation to a dynamic environment in which processing power, display capabilities and networking resources may alter.

To facilitate this, there has been considerable interest in the integration of component technologies with middleware platforms, as witnessed by the industrial interest in the CORBA 3 specification as well as the COM/ DCOM architecture. The importance of this integration is its ability to facilitate composition and re-use in a heterogeneous distributed environment. As of 1999, however, this technology had not been applied in the area of visualisation. This was an important omission given the increasing prominence of this field. This project addressed this deficiency in the state of the art by applying component technology to the field of distributed cooperative visualisation.  The work built on previous research in the Adapt and MANICORAL projects, at Lancaster University and RAL respectively.

Objectives

The main aim of the project was to investigate the role of component technology together with advanced middleware platforms to support the construction of dynamically adaptable distributed cooperative visualisation software. In addition, we investigated the potential of the concept of open bindings, within this framework, to support different styles of adaptation in a highly heterogeneous environment.

The project had the following key objectives:

1. to demonstrate the effectiveness of component technology and middleware for constructing distributed cooperative visualisation systems,
2. to develop strategies for the adaptation of such systems in dynamically evolving heterogeneous environments (taking into account network resources, end system resources, the possibility of component migration, and potentially different styles of visualisation),
3. to validate the approach through a series of application scenarios extracted from experience in the MANICORAL and other applications-based projects,
4. to feed results of the work into key standards bodies including the OMG.

Project Partners

The Visual Beans Project was a collaborative project funded under EPSRC's Multimedia Networking Applications Programme amongst the Distributed Multimedia Research Group in the Computing Department at Lancaster University, the Information Technology Department at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and the Distributed Systems Research Group in the School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences at Oxford Brookes University.

Key Personnel

	Lancaster University		Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Professor G. Blair (gordon@comp.lancs.ac.uk)		Mr J. Gallop (j.r.gallop@rl.ac.uk)
Dr G. Coulson (geoff@comp.lancs.ac.uk)		Mr I.J. Johnson (i.j.johnson@rl.ac.uk)
Dr T. Fitzpatrick (tf@comp.lancs.ac.uk)
	Oxford Brookes University	Professor D.A. Duce (daduce@brookes.ac.uk)
		Professor C.S. Cooper (cscooper@brookes.ac.uk)

Project publications & presentations

Related Links

• Visualization and Virtual Environments Community Club especially Web Graphics - The Way Forward and Collaborative Working in Visualization and Virtual Environments
• MANICORAL project publications

Duration and final report

The project started on 1 October 1999, finished on 31 September 2002, and issued its final report on 19 December 2002. Further publication submissions are currently in preparation.

Posters (pdf, ppt97) for the project were displayed at MNA2000, held 19/20 January 2000 at Chilworth Manor, Southampton University.