Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/J010898/1
Title:	Automatic Diagram Generation
Principal Investigator:	Fish, Dr AG
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	Nokia
Department:	Sch of Computing, Engineering & Maths
Organisation:	University of Brighton
Scheme:	First Grant - Revised 2009
Starts:	01 September 2012	Ends:	26 September 2013	Value (£):	99,940
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Computer Graphics & Visual. Fundamentals of Computing Information & Knowledge Mgmt
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:	Panel Date Panel Name Outcome 01 Feb 2012 EPSRC ICT Responsive Mode - Feb 2012 Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
Diagrams are an effective means of conveying a wide variety of different sources of information. The automatic generation of diagrams is essential for tasks such as the presentation of multiple views of large scale data sets (e.g. ontology analysis benefits from viewing information revolving around particular relationships). Enabling multiple significant relationships to be clearly presented greatly enhances the utility of visualisations (e.g. consider social network information presented as a diagram with graph edges used to depict the friends' relationship and containing curves to simultaneously indicate overlapping interest groups). The project aims to develop a unified framework for automatic diagram generation, allowing a mixture of features from different diagram types and enhancing control over layout; these theoretical advances are an essential precursor to use in practice. The project will provide significant academic impact (advances in the field, plus interaction between researchers in distinct fields) and industrial impact (improved support for ontology analysts, thereby reducing costs of product development cycles), and societal impact (enhanced communication between researchers and the public via improved visualisation capabilities). The involvement of prominent academic advisors from related fields and the substantial commitment from project partner Nokia will help to ensure the success of the project and assist in achieving long term impact. A major problem is the Generation Problem (GP): given an abstract specification, decide if there is a suitable drawing satisfying the specification and if so, then to automatically produce one. The drawing conventions (constraints on the diagram syntax that must be satisfied) and drawing rules (constraints that are desirable to be satisfied) may vary according to application domain requirements or user preferences. There is a substantial amount of work on the graph-based GP, and the GP for the region-based Euler diagrams has recently been addressed, but there is a serious gap concerning diagrams that intrinsically contain both graph and region based features. Generation techniques for such mixed diagram types are desirable to enhance views of complex information (thereby assisting analysts) by enabling the visualisation of the grouping of items for emphasis, alongside a graph based visualisation of other ontological relationships. Other application areas include visual languages (e.g. diagrammatic logic proof presentation), information visualisation (e.g. geographic information systems, network visualisation), graph drawing and knot theory. Thus use of knot theoretic codes within the Euler diagram setting to enhance generation and layout techniques is a novel approach, taken in conjunction with a graph based generation methodology. The automatic generation of diagrams has considerable potential for use as a means of efficiently and effectively displaying results or data in multiple scientific fields. Providing a single, formal basis will make the generation of diagrams easily accessible to researchers, without the need to reinvent techniques developed in other application areas. In general, communication between different disciplines is often difficult due to subject-specific terminologies and therefore research risks repetition. The development of a framework for automatically generating diagrams, which is applicable in different research areas, is important because it has the potential to stimulate communication and collaboration in different disciplines, as well as between researchers and industrial collaborators, by providing a common language. We will provide the theoretical grounding for software tools, enhancing industrial applicability as well as dissemination possibilities to the wider public and within the scientific community. The long term vision is that the project will set the groundwork for the establishment of a new field of Diagram Generation.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Impacts
Description This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk Summary Date Materialised
Sectors submitted by the Researcher
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Project URL:
Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.bton.ac.uk