2007/06/01 by Richard Wettel, Michele Lanza · 3 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Data Visualization and Analytics #Multimedia Communication and Technology #Software Engineering Research #Computer science #Locality #Visualization #Human–computer interaction #Point (geometry) #Software #Usability #Software visualization #Key (lock) #Metaphor #Program comprehension #Comprehension #Code (set theory) #Software system #Object (grammar) #Software engineering #Programming language #Component-based software engineering #Artificial intelligence
paper · doi:10.1109/vissof.2007.4290706
openalex publication_date 2007/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
This paper presents a 3D visualization approach which gravitates around the city metaphor, i.e., an object-oriented software system is represented as a city that can be traversed and interacted with: the goal is to give the viewer a sense of locality to ease program comprehension. The key point in conceiving a realistic software city is to map the information about the source code in meaningful ways in order to take the approach beyond beautiful pictures. We investigated several concepts that contribute to the urban feeling, such as appropriate layouts, topology, and facilities to ease navigation and interaction. We experimented our approach on a number of systems, and present our findings.