Inclusion of property profile in the production rule pattern for visualization software design

Abstract

The rapid development of information visualization in recent years has prompted new domain of problems in visual software engineering. Different design patterns have been proposed by the researchers with the purpose to guide the development of visualization software. The production rule pattern, as one of the important design patterns, uses a chain of if-then-else rules to dynamically determine the visual properties. It is a rather general pattern which does not provide much specific guideline on how the returned properties being determined. This paper improves the production rule pattern by developing a property profile for visualization software design. Property profile provides a convenient way to set the customized values. The use of property profile enhances the generality of the production rule pattern to cater for a wide range of visualization software applications. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.