The focus of this thesis work has been to apply object-oriented design knowledge to the domain of visualization tools. Our Visual Interactive Computing Environments group develops custom visualization tools for a variety of visualization applications. Rather then viewing each of these applications as an independent project, we envision them as being pieces of an overall picture. Our ultimate goal is to take our visualization experiences and put them together so that we can better serve our customers in the future.
A good framework captures the knowledge and the experience of the designer. It encompasses what the designer has learned about the domain. This work represents a lot of what I have learned over the last year working in the domain of visualization tools. It is by no means the ideal framework. Rather, it is a learning experience and possibly the beginnings of a visualization tool framework. Hopefully, elements or ideas from this framework will be reused and will help our group achieve its goals.