StarField Chart Demo
A StarField shows a two-dimensional field of markers,
each representing a multi-value data point of some kind,
and supporting user interaction to reveal more of their data.
It is a natural choice for geometric (or geographic) data;
the earliest applications displayed restaurants and real estate for sale,
and incident reports for a service organization,
according to user selection criteria.
Nowadays,
such information would often be kept in an SQL database,
such as
MySQL.
StarFields are not only a good way to display the retrieved data,
but could be used to help a user to compose further queries.
StarFields were originated by Dr. Ben Shneiderman,
his graduate student Chris Ahlberg,
and others and the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory,
at the University of Maryland.
Here is a recent overview by Dr. Shneiderman,
and some earlier work.
-
Dynamic queries, starfield displays, and the path to Spotfire
Ben Shneiderman, February 4, 1999
-
The Dynamic HomeFinder: Evaluating Dynamic Queries in a Real-Estate Information Exploration System.
Christopher Williamson and Ben Shneiderman,
Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory,
Center for Automation Research and Computer Science Department,
University of Maryland
- Williamson, C., and Shneiderman, B., The Dynamic HomeFinder:
Evaluating dynamic queries in a real-estate information exploration system,
Proc. ACM SIGIR92 Conference, pp 338-346.
Direct incremental input and immediate evaluation in a small DB,
with results displayed as map overlays.
- Ahlberg, Christopher and Shneiderman, Ben, Visual information seeking:
Tight coupling of dynamic query filters with starfield displays, Proc.
CHI'94 Conference: Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York,
NY (1994), 313-321 + color plates.
- Ahlberg, Christopher and Wistrand, Erik, IVEE: An information visualization
& exploration environment, Proc. IEEE Information Visualization
'95, IEEE Computer Press, Los Alamitos, CA (1995), 66-73.
This StarFieldDemo applet
shows it in use.
Starfield features:
- Report mouse-overs and clicks on Markers,
so that an application can show detailed information
about certain data points.
- Record clicks on Markers,
as if they were lines in a List,
with either SINGLE or MULTIPLE selection policy.
- Display Markers as Text or Images or Shapes.
- Expand specified Markers,
by popping up additional information,
in response to mouse-overs,
or according to other application controls and logic.
- Highlight specified Markers,
according to other application controls and logic.
- Hide specified Markers,
so that an application can show slices of data,
according to a slider (or other controls)
for the third data dimension.
- ShapeMarkers,
to show categories,
when a data dimension has few enough distinct values.
- SizeMarkers,
when a data dimension has many values.
- Zoom and Scroll to show large data sets.
Source Files
Other Java..
This code back-fit to 1.0 Java.
Please also visit my home page.
Email
me at morris_hirsch@brown.edu
Your comments, suggestions, bug reports,
bug fixes,
and enhancements,
are welcome!
Legalities
This software is provided free of charge with no support.
Email
morris_hirsch@brown.edu
if you do have a problem,
and I will try to help,
but I cannot promise to.
Except for all sections which are identified as the work,
and copyright,
of others,
this work is Copyright (C) 1998 by Morris Hirsch.
All rights reserved,
except as granted here.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms,
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except as may be restricted by original copyright holders,
provided that the following conditions are met:
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Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
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Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
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DISCLAIMER
This software is provided free of charge with no support.
This software is provided in source format;
You are advised to examine it and understand it,
before putting it to use.
This software uses only algorithms and coding techniques
that are available to the public in the open literature.
You are however,
advised to make your own determination of legality,
for your intended use.
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