The ADVISE project

ADVISE (Analysis of Data in a VISual Environment) is a collaborative research project which is developing a new toolkit for visualization and analysis. By merging statistical and visualization methods throughout the exploration process, ADVISE will provide insight into the increasingly large and complex datasets that now occur routinely in many application areas. ADVISE's architecture is service-oriented, making use of recent developments in web service technology and distributed visualization. Tailored applications have been created using the ADVISE toolkit, which will provide commercially viable solutions in targeted application areas such as pharmaceutics, environmental science and engineering. Building on UK strengths in statistics and visualization, the project promises to make a fundamental contribution to the emerging field of visual analytics.

The collaborators in the project are NAG (the lead partner), VSN International and the University of Leeds. Much of NAG's activity in visualization has been connected with its popular visualization toolkit, IRIS Explorer; the company has also been involved in previous research activity in this area, most recently through the UK e-Science projects gViz and climateprediction.net. VSN International, formed in 2000 as a spin-off from NAG and Rothamsted Research, has GenStat, a comprehensive statistics system, as its core product. The School of Computing at the University of Leeds has an international reputation for its visualization research, and has been involved in a number of EPSRC-funded projects including gViz, e-Viz, Integrative Biology and PolyFunGrid.

ADVISE is funded by the UK Technology Strategy Board, which is helping businesses work collaboratively with academic partners to develop technologies that will underpin products and services of the future.

Dissemination documents

• Talk slides: An Introduction to the ADVISE project (NAG, 20 November 2007)
• Poster: The ADVISE project (presented at UK e-Science All Hands meeting, Edinburgh, 08 September 2008)
• A Web Services Architecture for Visualization (presented at 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science, Indianapolis, IN, 07-12 December 2008):
  • Paper
  • Slides
  • Video of presentation
• Talk slides: Delivery Of Visualization Techniques Using Web Services (presented at NECTISE project workshop, BAe New Malden, 08 April 2009)
• Poster: Delivering Visualization using Web Services (presented at "Visualization In Science & Education" Gordon Research Conference, Oxford, 29 July 2009)
• Talk slides: Delivering Visualization using Web Services (presented at a birds-of-a-feather session on visualization at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, Oxford, 07 December 2009)
• Data Analysis and Visualization using Web Services (presented at The Joint e-Science Workshop for Collaboration between Korea and UK, Seoul, 18-19 March 2010):
  • Slides
  • Photos of presentation: 1, 2, 3.
• Paper: Flexible Delivery of Visualization Software and Services (presented at ICCS 2010, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 31 May-02 June 2010)

For more information on ADVISE, please contact us via nagnews@nag.co.uk

Using ADVISE to visualize results from the simulation of flow through a membrane (data courtesy of Dr Christopher Goodyer).

ADVISE visualization of data from magma flow simulations (data courtesy of Dr Julian Lowman).

Using ADVISE to visualize results from a numerical simulation of elastohydrodynamic lubrication (data courtesy of Dr Christopher Goodyer).

ADVISE visualization of MRI data, showing an aneurism (data courtesy of Dr Andy Bulpitt).

Using the ADVISE parallel coordinates module to analyse a multivariate dataset (module courtesy of Mr Colin Myers).