Design of a Process and a Container-Based Cloud Architecture for the Automatic Generation of Storyline Visualizations

This paper addresses the goal of automated creation of intuitive graphical representations of textual descriptions, in particular utilizing the popular storyline visualization paradigm - a diagram that describes a temporal sequence of interactions among several actors. We propose a container-based architecture that integrates natural language processing and information visualization components, which is flexible enough to be deployed on cloud platforms, including Hybrid and MultiCloud ones. The methodology and the architecture that we propose are driven by a motivating example, focusing on the automatic creation of visualizations for textual descriptions of movie synopses. Anyway, the approach devised would be relevant in several domains, such as Cultural Heritage and Smart Tourism, e.g. to create an effective and easy to understand visualization of historical events.