Database System Support for Data Visualization

一张图片胜过千言万语。用单一的图像代替复杂的叙述可能已经成为新闻业的陈词滥调，但这是数据探索的绝对要求。毕竟，一个人可能能读一千个单词，但不可能看到，更不用说理解十亿个数据点了。可视化为理解数据提供了一个不可或缺的工具*。数据可视化的过程可以从高层次的角度描述为由两步组成：处理数据，然后应用其中一种可视化算法。在过去的50年里，人们在数据可视化方面做了大量的工作。有趣的是，大部分工作都集中在可视化过程的第二步。这是可以理解的，因为数据集相对较小，可视化工具的性能通常由图形算法的效率决定。随着大数据集的出现，数据可视化工具的设计必须发生根本性的转变。数据检索和处理时间现在*主导了可视化过程的性能，因此不能忽视。没有有效的数据库支持，可视化，特别是交互式可视化是不可能的。我们提出的研究计划就是要解决这个问题。我们将研究不同类型数据的不同可视化技术，并分析数据处理引擎的性能，该引擎对要可视化的数据进行预处理。我们将提供新的数据处理技术，以提高后端系统的性能，并将其与前端可视化步骤集成。我们期望建立这种系统的原型，并通过实验证明它们的可行性。

One picture is worth a thousand words. The idea of replacing*a complex narrative with a single image may have become a cliché in journalism,*but it is an absolute requirement in data exploration. After all, one may be*able to read a thousand words, but cannot possibly look at, let alone*understand, a billion data points. Visualization offers an indispensable tool*in understanding the data. ***The*process of data visualization can be described from a high-level perspective as*consisting of two steps: processing the data, then applying one of the*visualization algorithms to it. There has been significant work done on data*visualization over the last 50 years. Interestingly, most of this work*concentrated on the second step of the visualization process. This was*understandable, as data sets were relatively small and the performance of the*visualization tools was often determined by the efficiency of the graphics*algorithms. With the advent of large data sets a radical shift in the design of*data visualization tools has to be made. Data retrieval and processing time now*dominates the performance of the visualization process, so cannot be ignored.*Without efficient database support, visualization, in particular, interactive*visualization is impossible. ***The research program we propose addresses this very problem. We*will look into different visualization techniques over different types of data*and analyze the performance of the data processing engine that pre-processes*data to be visualized. We will offer new data processing techniques to improve*the performance of the back-end system and integrate them with the front-end*visualization step. We expect to build prototypes of such systems and*demonstrate experimentally their viability.