Web-based 2-d Visualization with Large Datasets

Abstract

Modern astronomical surveys produce large catalogs. Modern archives are web-based. As the science becomes more and more data driven, the pressure on visualization tools to support large datasets increases. While tables can render one page at a time, image overlays showing the returned catalog entries or XY plots showing the relationship between table columns must cover all of the rows to be meaningful. The large data set could easily overwhelm the browsers capabilities. Therefore the amount of data to be transported or rendered must be reduced. IRSA's catalog visualization is based on Firefly package, developed in IPAC (Roby 2013). Firefly is used by multiple web-based tools and archives, maintained by IRSA: Catalog Search, Spitzer, WISE, Plank, etc. Its distinctive feature is the tri-view: table, image overlay, and XY plot. All three highly interactive components are integrated together. The tri-view presentation allows an astronomer to dissect a dataset in various ways and to detect underlying structure and anomalies in the data, which makes it a handy tool for data exploration. Many challenges are encountered when only a subset of data is used in place of the full data set. Preserving coherence and maintaining the ability to select and filter data become issues. This talk addresses how we have solved problems in large dataset visualization.

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