A LANGUAGE FOR SPECIFYING INFORMATIONAL GRAPHICS FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES

Stuart M. Shieber, Wendy Lucas

2007

Abstract

Information visualization tools, such as commercial charting packages, provide a standard set of visualizations for tabular data, including bar charts, scatter plots, pie charts, and the like. For some combinations of data and task, these are suitable visualizations. For others, however, novel visualizations over multiple variables would be preferred but are unavailable in the fixed list of standard options. To allow for these cases, we introduce a declarative language for specifying visualizations on the basis of the first principles on which (a subset of) informational graphics are built. The functionality we aim to provide with this language is presented by way of example, from simple scatter plots to versions of two quite famous visualizations: Minard’s depiction of troop strength during Napoleon’s march on Moscow and a map of the early ARPAnet from the ancient history of the Internet. Benefits of our approach include flexibility and expressiveness for specifying a range of visualizations that cannot be rendered with standard commercial systems.

References

  1. Bertin, J. (1983). Semiology of Graphics. University of Wisconsin Press.
  2. Kosak, C., Marks, J., and Shieber, S. (1994). Automating the layout of network diagrams with specified visual organization. Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 24(3):440-454.
  3. Mackinlay, J. (1986). Automating the design of graphical presentations of relational information. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 5(2):110-141.
  4. Roth, S. F., Kolojejchick, J., Mattis, J., and Chuah, M. C. (1995). Sagetools: An intelligent environment for sketching, browsing, and customizing data-graphics. In CHI 7895: Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems, pages 409-410, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.
  5. Roth, S. F. and Mattis, J. (1990). Data characterization for graphic presentation. In Proceedings of the ComputerHuman Interaction Conference (CHI 7890).
  6. Ryall, K., Marks, J., and Shieber, S. M. (1997). An interactive constraint-based system for drawing graphs. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST).
  7. Wilkinson, L. (1999). The Grammar of Graphics. SpringerVerlag, New York, NY.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

M. Shieber S. and Lucas W. (2007). A LANGUAGE FOR SPECIFYING INFORMATIONAL GRAPHICS FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES . In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-8111-05-0, pages 5-12. DOI: 10.5220/0001326300050012


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft07,
author={Stuart M. Shieber and Wendy Lucas},
title={A LANGUAGE FOR SPECIFYING INFORMATIONAL GRAPHICS FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2007},
pages={5-12},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001326300050012},
isbn={978-989-8111-05-0},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - A LANGUAGE FOR SPECIFYING INFORMATIONAL GRAPHICS FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES
SN - 978-989-8111-05-0
AU - M. Shieber S.
AU - Lucas W.
PY - 2007
SP - 5
EP - 12
DO - 10.5220/0001326300050012