Home

Getting Started

Running the demo application from Eclipse on localhost

1. Unzip sample_tiles.zip in the sample-tiles folder, and note the absolute path to the tile folder. The sample_tiles folder contains precomputed data tiles for selected combinations of dimensions in two datasets: 4.5 million user checkins on Brightkite, and 123.6 million on-time performance records for domestic US flights.
2. In Eclipse, Import imMens (webapp) and imMensPostgresConnector (tile-compute) as Existing Projects into Workspace
3. Install Run-Jetty-Run
4. Open ImmensServlet.java in src/servlet/, in the method public void init(ServletConfig config), edit the variable tileBaseLocalURL to be the path to the sample tile folder. This is to tell imMens where to look for pre-computed data tiles
5. Run ImmensServlet.java using the Run As -> Run Jetty menu option with the following configurations:
   Port: (default is 8080)
Context: /imMens
WebApp dir: WebContent
   It is recommended to increase the Java heap size in the VM arguments under Run Configurations.
6. Load the web application at this URL: http://localhost:8080/imMens/

Interactions supported in the demo application

brush: move mouse
select: single click
select a range or an area: shift + click and drag
clear selection : click on an empty area
zoom: click on zoom controls
zoom in and center on a location: double click on the location
pan: drag
change the lower and upper bounds of color mapping: drag the range slider's endpoints
toggle the scale of histograms and bar charts between linear and log-scale: the “log-scale” checkbox

Visualizing Your Own Dataset (in progress)

The primary data reduction strategy used by imMens is binned aggregation. To use imMens on your own datasets, the first step is to define binning schemes for each of the dimensions of your data. See defining binning schemes for instructions.

Data tiles

To visualize your datasets using imMens, you will need to first compute data tiles. For a description of what a data tile is, refer to the paper.

If you want to compute data tiles on your own datasets, the tile-compute folder provides sample Java program that computes data tiles from a PostgreSQL database. More instructions are available here: precompute your own data tiles.