IVIS: Highly customizable framework for visualization and processing of IoT data

Abstract

This tool paper presents the IVIS platform for processing and visualizing IoT and CPS data. The platform provides a web-based interface that allows both definition of complex visualizations and data processing jobs as well as exploring the data. Compared to the existing open-source and commercial offerings, IVIS follows a different model and focuses on flexibility. Instead of providing a complex administrative UI for creating visualizations by dragging and dropping components onto a dashboard, IVIS provides a set of JavaScript-based visualization components that are glued together using simple JavaScript code. Similarly, the data processing jobs can be defined using code in scripting languages, such as Python, which allows exploiting the wealth of existing libraries for numerical processing. This not only makes the definition of visualizations and data processing jobs much more expressive, but it also turns out to be significantly easier to use when building complex parametric visualizations— especially when they need to deal with many sensors. This proved to be crucial in deploying IVIS in a number of international research projects, because it enabled us to rapidly setup complex visualizations and data-processing tasks, catering to project- and partner-specific requirements.