Visual query specification and interaction with industrial engineering data

Nowadays, industrial engineering environments are typically characterized by sensors which stream massive amounts of different types of data. It is often difficult for industrial engineers to query, interact with, and interpret the data. In order to process many different kinds of distributed data stream sources originating from different kinds of data sources, a distributed federated data stream management system (FDSMS) is necessary. Although there exist some research efforts aimed at providing visual interfaces for querying temporal and real time data, there is virtually no existing work that provides a visual query specification and interaction interface that directly corresponds to a distributed federated data stream management system. This paper describes a visual environment that supports users in visually specifying queries and interacting with industrial engineering data. The visual environment comprises: a visual query specification and interaction environment, and a corresponding visual query language that runs on top of a distributed FDSMS. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.