Reducing the effort of building object-oriented visualizations

The construction of visualization systems is a difficult task. The management of large quantities of data and the support of dynamic exploration processes are some of the main causes of this difficulty. However, current approaches are far away from the system designer needs. Automatic construction systems, toolkits and dataflow based systems do not considerate all quality aspects such as flexibility, extensibility, modularity, reusability and generality. The design of a software architecture for construction of visualization systems, called Telescope, is described. This architecture allows building of visualization applications in different domains, as exemplified by the several developed applications. Also, it allows the incorporation of new tasks, algorithms and data types, and the specification of presentations in a declarative way. The development of applications using Telescope is described, along with a system developed with it, WarVis, for visualizing information about military conflicts