A New Workflow to Interact with and Visualize Big Data for Web Applications

Interaction and visualization are two significant methods for both business people and scientists to find "gold nuggets" buried in raw data. These two methods can simplify complex theories and make it easier for people from different research areas to cooperate. Many prevalent web-based data interaction and visualization tools and libraries are not as effective as before because of big data. Most of the traditional client/server web application visualization tools and libraries process visualization and interaction in the client side. This workflow requires the server side to transfer data to the client side. If the data size is very big, the data transferring time is unbearable. In this paper, we propose a fast and new method for client/server web application to interact and visualize big data. The method visualizes data in the server side with multiple CPU cores and transfers result images to the client side. The client side collects users' interaction information and the server side updates visualization results based on the interaction information. We tested the workflow with large volume datasets and it is much faster than traditional workflows.