VisSnippets: A Web-Based System for Impromptu Collaborative Data Exploration on Large Displays

January 1st, 2018 - Ongoing

Categories: Applications, Multimedia, Software, User Groups, Remote Collaboration

About

In the past decades, science has become increasingly interdisciplinary and scientific discovery has experienced a paradigm shift from the classical scientific method to data-intensive scientific discovery. SAGE2 provides these interdisciplinary collaborators with a powerful, shared workspace. However, there remains a high cost of parallel work integration for data-intensive work. VisSnippets is a system which allows collaborators to perform expressive, impromptu data analysis and exploration within SAGE2.

VisSnippets acts as a collaborative interface to exploratory programming, allowing users to write modular “snippets” of code for data retrieval, processing/aggregation, and visualization. Users may then compose modular analysis blocks from the shared snippet pool into branching data pipelines. The snippets may be edited or “cloned” by collaborators, and reused/applied multiple times across a collaborative session.

To further facilitate collaborative work, the VisSnippets system provides further abstraction onto the expressive foundation of exploratory programming. VisSnippets reduces the overhead to scaffold a responsive web application and allows users to walk away from the collaborative analysis with a packaged web application containing all of the analysis.