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CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY Eleni Anthippi Chatzimichali ...

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6 Development of improved visualisation<br />

methods for chemometrics applications<br />

6.1 Introduction<br />

A range of novel visualisation tools has been used throughout this thesis. This chapter<br />

provides a thorough description of the visualisation techniques, graphics libraries and<br />

web technologies underlying these tools. Even though there has been tremendous<br />

progress in the field of chemometrics, often the visualisation tools used to<br />

demonstrate the results are out-dated and the graphs occasionally difficult to<br />

comprehend. One of the aims of this project was to pursue the development of new<br />

visualisation methods that enhance the interpretability of the project’s data and<br />

results, with a view to employing them for the construction of static images,<br />

interactive web-based graphs, and dynamically generated reports.<br />

6.2 Materials and Methods<br />

6.2.1 The importance of Data Visualisation<br />

Data visualisation can be defined as “the science of visual representation of data,<br />

which contains information abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or<br />

variables for the units information” (Friendly, 2001). Over the past years, software<br />

systems have attempted to integrate heterogeneous data at both the data source and<br />

the semantic level (Goesmann et al., 2003). However, the sheer volume and<br />

complexity of the data under study makes it almost impossible to illustrate using<br />

traditional visualisation methods.<br />

170

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