An Online System for Visualizing UOIT Class Schedules

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to design a system that will enable users to visualize aspects of a schedule so that the information can be interpreted in a meaningful way. The concept of visualizing data has allowed many possible forms such as graphs, time tables, maps, etc. In order to make the results of this thesis more accessible it was decided early on to switch to a web-based implementation. This way a wide audience of faculty or students of the school could have access this information and allow for the project to have a larger scope. Implementations for displaying data include tables, a week calendar view, a week time table view with classes sized to represent time, and coloured bar graphics to represent capacity and time based on spatial location. In addition to the method of displaying schedule information the data to display has been focused on a few different areas of: courses, rooms, and capacity. Displaying lists of courses as well as being able to connect courses to professors resulted in the calendar view. The need for room schedules resulted in the time table to better display the information and help with the availability visualization at the same time. However the availability of several rooms or several professors was not capable with the calendar or time table view, so this resulted in more abstract methods of attempting to display availability data. Availability is displayed using generated graphics of coloured bars representing classes with their colour representing capacity. Another requirement besides the visualization part of each piece of the thesis was the accessibility. Being a web-based program the project to be flexible such as allowing different parameters to customize results, as well as being easy for the average user to navigate. Methods such as connecting different colours for each visualization, breadcrumbs, tooltips, clickable areas to display more information and easy menu selections were included in the thesis webpage. This project has iterated over several different designs through web pages and visualization to attempt to find the most flexible method of presenting the collected information.