Visual Glyph Editor for Rapid Prototyping

Glyph-based visualization techniques offer an elegant representation of multivariate data. But only an efficient glyph design facilitates the investigation of a multivariate data set, bad designs can be confusing, ambiguous and even lead to a false understanding of the data.
To find the best glyph concept, the designer might has to try and refine several different approaches. But without a visual editor that allows the designer to create novel glyph representations and map data variables to the visual features of this so created glyph, the designer has to either use a visualization framework and do some intensive programming, or draw the glyphs by hand. To address this shortcoming and enhance the process of designing new glyphs, the aim of this thesis is to provide a Visual Glyph Editor for rapid prototyping of new glyph representations. Since no editor yet exists that fulfills our requirements, we are introducing an own approach of a prototype of a Visual Glyph Editor in this thesis.
Nowadays in many domains, as for example in medicine, a lot of the collected data is time-oriented data, hence the goal was to also be able to process and analyze this kind of data with the editor, which is not an easy task, because time has inherent characteristics that have to be considered.
In this work we started with a literature research, then continued with the design and the architecture of our prototype. To evaluate our concept we performed performance tests and discussed the prototype with three domain experts who judged the concept as a good idea and the prototype as a useful tool. The findings of the evaluations are presented and discussed at the end of this work.