Functional languages provide powerful forms of abstraction, very different from the imperative, object/service-oriented materials from which visualization systems are usually crafted. In an EPSRC-funded joint project with the programming systems group at York, we are exploring new ways of building visualization systems that can benefit from heterogeneous resources on a computing grid. The project has three goals: formulating polytypic visualization algorithms; distributing these algorithms over a grid; and developing multi-stage variants that can be specialized as needed, adapting the program and/or run-time system to local resources.

Funded under the DTI Technology Programme, ADVISE (Analysis of Data in a Visual Environment) is seeking to integrate tools for visualization and statistical data analysis within a framework that can run across distributed computing resources. Conducted in collaboration with NAG Ltd and VSNi Ltd, the result will be a tool for the emerging field of visual analytics, allowing users to explore volumes of data that are otherwise too complex or large to understand through purely visual inspection. Although not implemented in a functional framework, the project is exploring how ideas from the Lazy Polytypic Grid project can be used to implement sharing and streaming of data.

I am a co-investigator on the VISTA project (Visualising integrated information on buried assets to reduce streetworks), funded by the DTI Technology Programme. The visualization side of VISTA is developing methods for representing data about underground assets, in particular reflecting the different kinds of uncertainty present in the data, and ways of managing the multiple sources of detail resulting from the integration work being carried out in the project.