Description
The Online Discourse Event Visualizer (ODEV) is an analytical tool which will be used for visual representation and performing visual and mathematical analysis for research on social science evaluation of Human-Computer-Human Interaction. Users of a set of research portals provide their inputs on various propositions for transportation related projects in the form of concerns, comments, votes etc. This tool tracks the events and activities occurring over the duration of research, at various geographical locations and graphically represents the research data in an interactive 3-dimensional visual format. In addition to that this tool performs analytical calculations on the data and provides feedback helpful in visual analysis of the participation of the users of the portal. The ODEV is a Java based software application which facilitates visualization and analysis of spatio-temporal data in a 3-dimensional virtual environment. It extracts the essential data required for the visualization of the discourse events from an MS Access database and then performs a set of calculations. The horizontal axes represent the location of the event (defined in latitude and longitude), whereas the vertical axis represents the time at which the event occurred. The grapevine structure generated as a result of this 3D rendering of the data, progresses vertically as time passes. The ODEV has the following main modules: (1) a Java3D virtual universe module that generates an interactive 3-dimensional platform for rendering the discourse event related data visually, (2) a data extraction module that queries the database for extracting the essential and relevant data needed for analysis and visualization, and finally (3) a cue calculator module which performs the various analytical calculations on the data and generates and handles the results.
