InfraVis: National Research Infrastructure for Visualisation of Data

Essentially all academic research of today relies on analysis of data from a wide range of sources such as: experiments, sensors, modelling, simulation, or mining of data repositories. Several underpinning, and rapidly developing, technologies are supporting the analysis of this data. Visualization serves as an interface to this ecosystem of tools and methods and integrates them into environments supporting scientific workflows, effectively sharing cognitive load between computers and humans. There is, however, a gap between the state-of-the-art in visual data analysis and current wide-spread academic practice. Support for the introduction of new, improved and tailored, visual data analysis environments thus have the potential to address challenges involving large and complex data, creating competitive advantages for Swedish researchers.

To fill the gap and capitalize on this opportunity, the InfraVis initiative has been created with the mission to operate an infrastructure consisting of visualization experts, software solutions, and access to high-end visualization laboratories. Users of InfraVis will be offered assistance through a national helpdesk with rapid response times as well as in-depth projects addressing data and software challenges. InfraVis will also provide software solutions based on development within connected research groups, curation of international software and best practise, and user training in the form of courses, seminars and on-line documentation. To build an infrastructure with national coverage, we have pooled together nine visualization environments in Sweden interconnected in a nodal structure. The nodes will be hosted in proximity to research environments in visualization, which enables direct access to the research front as well as to state-of-art facilities. InfraVis can be used both as an input to various resources to solve simpler problems and issues but will also offer support at a more advanced level, which also includes software development. InfraVis will have strong connections to and collaborations with other local, national and international research infrastructures. For example, SNIC users, researchers at MAX IV, CERN researchers and initiatives from the life sciences and digital humanities will be able to benefit from access to visualization expertise.

InfraVis will create a common gateway to Swedish visualization resources and enhance the competence of researchers in various fields around the country. The resources include both hardware and software but, above all, human expertise. The project is an initiative of nine Swedish universities, with Chalmers University of Technology as principal investigator and Linnaeus University as one of the partners, and is funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project is currently scheduled for the period of 2022–2026.