Facilitating information system development with Panoramic view on data
This addresses the challenge of software development for non-technical users in data-oriented problem domains, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing visualization and associative thinking paradigms.
The paper tackles the problem of facilitating information system development for users with minimal technical knowledge by introducing Panorama, a software solution based on associative thinking and context+focus visualization, which shortens the Software Development Life Cycle by up to 25% in data-oriented domains by automating physical design and programming.
The increasing amount of information and the absence of an effective tool for assisting users with minimal technical knowledge lead us to use associative thinking paradigm for implementation of a software solution - Panorama. In this study, we present object recognition process, based on context + focus information visualization techniques, as a foundation for realization of Panorama. We show that user can easily define data vocabulary of selected domain that is furthermore used as the application framework. The purpose of Panorama approach is to facilitate software development of certain problem domains by shortening the Software Development Life Cycle with minimizing the impact of implementation, review and maintenance phase. Our approach is focused on using and updating data vocabulary by users without extensive programming skills. Panorama therefore facilitates traversing through data by following associations where user does not need to be familiar with the query language, the data structure and does not need to know the problem domain fully. Our approach has been verified by detailed comparison to existing approaches and in an experiment by implementing selected use cases. The results confirmed that Panorama fits problem domains with emphasis on data oriented rather than ones with process oriented aspects. In such cases the development of selected problem domains is shortened up to 25%, where emphasis is mainly on analysis, logical design and testing, while omitting physical design and programming, which is performed automatically by Panorama tool.