We present BGS (Big Graph Surfer), a scalable graph visualization tool that creates hierarchical structure from original graphs and provide interactive navigation along the hierarchy by expanding or collapsing clusters when visualizing large-scale graphs. A distributed computing framework-Spark provides the backend for BGS on clustering and visualization. This architecture makes it capable of visualizing a graph bigger than 1 billion nodes or edges in real-time after preprocessing. In addition, BGS provides a series of hierarchy and graph exploration methods, such as hierarchy view, hierarchy navigation, hierarchy search, graph view, graph navigation, graph search, and other useful interactions. These functionalities facilitate the exploration of very large-scale graphs. To evaluate the effectiveness of BGS, we apply BGS to several large-scale graph datasets, and discuss its scalability, usability, and flexibility.
Urban data is being collected in increasing quantities as smart cities around the globe seek to understand and improve their operations and plan their growth. This trend is set to continue as UNICEF predicts that 75% of people will live in cities by the end of the 21st century. One of the aims of Smart City initiatives is to improve inclusivity by communicating more about the city to citizens and organizational stakeholders. The large amounts of data and computational cost of the calculations required to do this mean that cloud-based analytics and visualization is an attractive option as it can deliver results to virtually any client device. In this article, we describe the design and implementation of the Urban Insight Cloud Engine (UICE) a pilot cloud-based 3D visualization system for Smart Cities that has been created using open software and data sets. This delivers a continuous live view of data collected by Urban Observatory sensors in the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. We precede this with a discussion of our experience designing the facilities that exist, are being built, or are being planned to be built, to support our visualization research and production at Newcastle University.