Integrating Visual Data Flow Programming with Data Stream Management

Sammanfattning: Data stream management and data flow programming have many things in common. In both cases one wants to transfer possibly infinite sequences of data items from one place to another, while performing transformations to the data. This Thesis focuses on the integration of a visual programming language with a data stream management system (DSMS) to support the construction, configuration, and visualization of data stream applications. In the approach, analyses of data streams are expressed as continuous queries (CQs) that emit data in real-time. The LabVIEW visual programming platform has been adapted to support easy specification of continuous visualization of CQ results. LabVIEW has been integrated with the DSMS SVALI through a stream-oriented client-server API. Query programming is declarative, and it is desirable to make the stream visualization declarative as well, in order to raise the abstraction level and make programming more intuitive. This has been achieved by adding a set of visual data flow components (VDFCs) to LabVIEW, based on the LabVIEW actor framework. With actor-based data flows, visualization of data stream output becomes more manageable, avoiding the procedural control structures used in conventional LabVIEW programming while still utilizing the comprehensive, built-in LabVIEW visualization tools.The VDFCs are part of the Visual Data stream Monitor (VisDM), which is a client-server based platform for handling real-time data stream applications and visualizing stream output. VDFCs are based on a data flow framework that is constructed from the actor framework, and are divided into producers, operators, consumers, and controls. They allow a user to set up the interface environment, customize the visualization, and convert the streaming data to a format suitable for visualization.Furthermore, it is shown how LabVIEW can be used to graphically define interfaces to data streams and dynamically load them in SVALI through a general wrapper handler. As an illustration, an interface has been defined in LabVIEW for accessing data streams from a digital 3D antenna.VisDM has successfully been tested in two real-world applications, one at Sandvik Coromant and one at the Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University. For the first case, VisDM was deployed as a portable system to provide direct visualization of machining data streams. The data streams can differ in many ways as do the various visualization tasks. For the second case, data streams are homogenous, high-rate, and query operations are much more computation-demanding. For both applications, data is visualized in real-time, and VisDM is capable of sufficiently high update frequencies for processing and visualizing the streaming data without obstructions.The uniqueness of VisDM is the combination of a powerful and versatile DSMS with visually programmed and completely customizable visualization, while maintaining the complete extensibility of both.