The FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) for scientific data management are widely recognized as a gold standard of open research practice. They are increasingly adopted by scientists in their research processes, and are already frequently required by funding agencies such as the European Research Council (ERC) and others. Distinct from other open data initiatives that focus on the human scholar, the FAIR Principles put specific emphasis on machine legibility, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals.

A holistic approach to research data management not only considers FAIRness of data, but extends to all processes and artifacts used to obtain research results, including visualization and subjecting it to FAIR requirements.

FAIRvis aims bring together experts in visualization and FAIR data practices to discuss two core questions at the intersection of visualization research and scientific data management:

  1. How can visualization systems and methods be useful in supporting FAIR research practices? What are (potential) roles of visualization in supporting researchers in finding, organizing, annotating with metadata, and reusing research data?

  2. How can visualization processes and products be FAIR? How can they be (more) effectively annotated and shared, made (more) interoperable and (more) reproducible?

FAIRvis’ dual aim is to a) take inventory of the state of FAIRness of visualization research and practice, and b) identify open problems for the visualization community to address in future research, such that visualization can flourish in a FAIR future.

Registration

FAIRvis is co-located with EuroVis 2023 in Leipzig. Please register here to attend FAIRvis.

Program

FAIRvis is a EuroVis 2023 workshop. For detailed time information, please also check here.

Session 1: Overview and Perspectives
Session Chair: Heike Leitte

  • Opening and Goals (Christoph Garth)

  • Keynote: FAIR Visualization in Plant Research (~ 40 min)
    Timo Mühlhaus, NFDI consortium DataPLANT and RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau

  • Keynote: Toward FAIR Visualization of Visualization Research (~ 40 min)
    Tobias Isenberg, INRIA

    Findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible research is gaining increasing importance in our field. As visualization researchers this often relates to the data that we work with and the software we write to analyze it. In the past, my colleagues and I have tried to analyze our field of visualization itself by looking at its evaluation practices, its use of keywords in papers, and the papers we publish and present at our conferences. So in this talk I will share some of our experiences in doing so, and the challenges we faced and are facing to make and keep the respective data and software accessible to the community. I will talk about our projects [KeyVis](keyvis.org), [Vispubdata](vispubdata.org), and, most recently, [VIS30K](visimagenavigator.github.io). I will report on the challenges to acquire the data, share it, and create and maintain software tools to work with them.

Session 2: Insights and Discussion
Session Chair: Christina Gillmann

  • Lightning Talks (~ 50 min)

    • Making Vis FAIR - Experiences from Computational Biology
      Daniel Wiegreffe, University of Leipzig

      Visualization has many important tasks and is often used for example for exploration and analysis of data in computational biology. In this field of research, many experiments are conducted multiple times, sometimes experiments are repeated years later. The software for analyzing the data derived from these experiments must therefore meet high quality standards, so that the results of experiments are reproducible. Therefore, the FAIR principles are often applied to the software used in this field. In my talk I want to share my experiences on the implementation of the FAIR principle for visualization software in the field of computational biology. These are to a large extent also transferable to general visualization software.

    • Towards FAIR visualization of FAIR climate data
      Michael Böttinger, Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum

      Especially in the field of climate research, it is particularly important that the data and methods used to gain knowledge are comprehensible. The methods are described in scientific journal publications, and the data measured, calculated or derived for this purpose are also increasingly published in a FAIR-compliant manner (Wilkinson et al. 2016). This is done, among others, by the World Climate Data Center located at DKRZ. For the sixth World Climate Assessment Report (Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis), published in 2021, an attempt was also made for the first time to publish not only the relevant primary data, but also the visualizations or the corresponding code for them.

    • Rules, Regulations, and the “I” in FAIR
      Guido Reina, University of Stuttgart

      We should make source code a mandatory part of submissions where appropriate. It is not fit for a discipline as close to computer science as ours to ignore this when other domains have been requiring complete reproducibility for years. Having the code to reproduce paper figures, at least, is not an unreasonable requirement. Any improvement on that can be considered a net win. Code is also critical when considering Interoperability in the FAIR principles: abstractly specifying visualizations has been researched in the past, but the building blocks of visualizations and visualization tools are so diverse that mixing and matching them is still going to be a challenge for a while, especially when aiming for scalability. Even if combining them were easier, the data itself presents challenges. Many of our current problems do not scale with easily portable exchange formats, and container file formats give a false sense of accomplishment. Specialized, high-performance formats bring the discussion full circle to specialized approaches and the necessity of publishing sources.

    • The Data Science Infrastructure Project
      James P. Ahrens, Los Alamos National Laboratory

      The Data Science Infrastructure (DSI) project focuses on automated data-driven collection approaches to make metadata and data more readily available for use in scientific workflows. DSI provides an API for storing, searching, and accessing metadata and associated data including collections of simulation and experimental runs across different filesystems and computing environments. DSI supports working with ensembles of data, provenance data, machine learning models input and outputs, and performance data. An open-source release of DSI can be found at https://github.com/lanl/dsi.

    • Towards a Unifying Theory: Hypothesis Grammar for Data, Task, and Visualization
      Kai Xu, University of Nottingham

      Data, task, and visualizations form the foundation of data visualization, where the effectiveness of a visualization depends on its alignment with the data and the user's task. While existing grammar frameworks like "The Grammar of Graphics" and interaction specifications in tools like vega-lite cover graphics and interaction, respectively, a comprehensive grammar for task remains elusive, despite numerous proposed task taxonomies. These taxonomies are challenging to operationalize, lacking the ability to easily translate into code that can generate visualizations and interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose a preliminary step towards a task grammar by introducing a hypothesis grammar. Complex tasks can be deconstructed into simpler hypotheses, drawing from our understanding of scientific hypotheses. One key advantage of this grammar is its potential to automatically generate hypotheses from a given dataset and subsequently generate visualizations for hypothesis testing, leveraging existing graphics and interaction grammars. Moreover, integrating hypothesis grammar can greatly support the FAIR principles. For instance, data can be annotated with the hypotheses they address, providing a deeper understanding of the "why" behind the data, surpassing conventional metadata like timestamps and authors. This annotation opens up possibilities such as searching for data based on specific hypotheses

  • Open Discussion (~30 min)

  • Next Steps and Closing (Christoph Garth, 10 min)

Call for Participation

In order to initiate a lively discussion in the FAIRvis Workshop, we call for lightning talks on open problems in FAIR visualization or on existing use of FAIR practices in and for visualization.

Lightning talks should be approximately 5 minutes long and may include any results, experiences, or insights in relation to visualization and the FAIR principles.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • metadata annotation of visualizations and visualization workflows
  • reproducibility in visualization
  • implementation-agnostic description of visualizations
  • provenance visualization and provenance of visualizations
  • domain-specific FAIR visualization solutions
  • visualization across large-scale user bases
  • visualization archives and libraries
  • FAIR best practices for visualization research
  • examples of (un)successful usage of FAIR principles in visualization research
  • evaluation on the FAIRness in visualization research
  • extension of FAIR principles for visualization

If you would like to participate, please send a short abstract of the talk that you are planning to give (approx. 200 words) as well as your information (name, affiliation, research interest) to gillmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de.

Important Dates
  • May 31, 2023 deadline for lightning talk submissions
  • June 12, 2023 FAIRvis workshop

Organizers

  • Min Chen (University of Oxford)
  • Christoph Garth (RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau)
  • Christina Gillmann (University of Leipzig)
  • Heike Leitte (RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau)