Flux Capacitors for JavaScript DeLoreans: Approximate Caching for Physics-based Data Interaction

Interactive visualizations have become an effective and pervasive mode of allowing users to explore the data in a visual, fluid, and immersive manner. While modern web, mobile, touch, and gesture-driven next-generation interfaces such as Leap Motion allow for highly interactive experiences, they pose unique and unprecedented workloads to the underlying data platform. Usually, these visualizations do not need precise results for most queries generated during an interaction, and the users require the intermediate results as feedback only to guide them towards their goal query. We present a middleware component - \emph{Flux Capacitor}, that insulates the backend from bursty and query-intensive workloads. \emph{Flux Capacitor} uses prefetching and caching strategies devised by exploiting the inherent physics-metaphor of UI widgets such as friction and inertia in range sliders, and typical user-interaction. This enables low interaction response times while intelligently trading off accuracy.