Mondrian: an agile information visualization framework

ABSTRACT

Data visualization is the process of representing data as pictures to support reasoning about the underlying data. For the interpretation to be as easy as possible, we need to be as close as possible to the original data. As most visualization tools have an internal meta-model, which is different from the one for the presented data, they usually need to duplicate the original data to conform to their meta-model. This leads to an increase in the resources needed, increase which is not always justified. In this work we argue for the need of having an engine that is as close as possible to the data and we present our solution of moving the visualization tool to the data, instead of moving the data to the visualization tool. Our solution also emphasizes the necessity of reusing basic blocks to express complex visualizations and allowing the programmer to script the visualization using his preferred tools, rather than a third party format. As a validation of the expressiveness of our framework, we show how we express several already published visualizations and describe the pros and cons of the approach.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Graphical user interfaces

• Information systems

  • Data management systems

    • Database design and models

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • Development frameworks and environments

      • Integrated and visual development environments

    • General programming languages

      • Language features

        • Data types and structures