Visualization techniques in collaborative domain-specific modeling environment

Contemporary engineering information system designs are generally interdisciplinary and exceedingly complex. As a result, managing and understanding these systems collaboratively poses unnecessary challenges to end users. In this research, we studied and developed visualization and collaboration techniques to facilitate comprehension and management of engineering information systems with great complexity. Existing commercial and research visualization developments only address applications in specific domains. This paper introduces two techniques applicable to large-scale models across various domains and integrated within a web-based modeling platform, WebGME. The techniques presented are 1) domain-specific visualization that allows representation of components in each domain with conventional or meaningful icons, and 2) model connectivity abstraction that allows domain independent, context-aware abstraction of model connections.