Nan Cao

DaVinci

DaVinci is an opensource project which targets on designing a light weighted information visualization framework for visualization component and application developments. When compared with some other projects such as Prefuse, Peony and The InfoVis Toolkit, this project focused on providing the simplest interfaces and architectures that facilitate efficent agile devlopment. This project is initially designed for my personal usage of the Ph.D study at HKUST. Currently, the project is released under the MIT open source license. Some of the packages and files are ported from other projects such as Prefuse. Please follow their licenses if you want to use these packages.
The source codes are downloadable now from the following links:

source() | introduction () | binary() | tutorial() | docs( ) | bug report

Peony InfoVis Framework

The major goal of Peony is to design and develop an integrated Information Visualization (InfoVis) development platform which can handle both structured and unstructured data and plug in various kinds of analysis methods from different domains. Rather than being a low level InfoVis development toolkit, it is targeted at the full range of InfoVis users, including the InfoVis application designers from various application domains, the InfoVis component designers, and the professional InfoVis algorithm designers. Various interaction techniques and visualization algorithms are supported in different separable modules, making it easy to build different visualizations by composing them in different ways. By now, Peony contains a lot of reusalbe visualization components, style widgets, and interaction widgests and is aopted by over 50 projects inside and outside Research. I am the chief architect and designer of Peony.

see also:
Paper:
1. Peony : A Light Weighted Interactive InfoVis Toolkit, HCHI 2006 (in Chinese)
2. Peony : An integrated InfoVis design and development platform (APVis)
Website:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_teams.nsf/pages/iva.peony.html

Visualization Components Design based on Peony

Based on the Peony framework, a set of visualizaiton component is designed include FanLens, TrammelMap, Hyperbolic Graph, Voyager, etc.

Patent:
1. 200710107720.8 A method of generating 3D Carousel tree view. Nan Cao , Shixia Liu, Hui Su
2. 200710160532.1 Sunburst Graph: A new method for visualizing and exploring large hierarchy graph. Nan Cao , Shixia Liu, Tianshu Wang .
3. 200810108432.9 A method of visualizing huge amount of information on a sphere. Nan Cao , ShengYi Wang, Shixia Liu
4. 200810096094.1 The method for providing a clear moving track in the animated transition between related data graphics. Nan Cao , Shixia Liu, Tianshu Wang

Applicatoins of Peony inside IBM

Widely deployed whint IBM China Research Lab and IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. More than 50 projects are using these libraries and components.