Protovis: A Declarative Language for Interactive Visualization

• Activity Number: 445
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 3, 2011 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
• Author(s): Jeffrey Heer*+
• Companies: Stanford University
• Keywords: visualization ; design ; toolkits ; user interfaces ; interaction

Abstract

Despite myriad tools for visualizing data, there remains a gap between the notational ef?ciency of high-level visualization systems and the expressiveness and accessibility of low-level graphical systems. Powerful visualization systems may be in?exible or impose abstractions foreign to visual thinking, while graphical systems such as rendering APIs and vector-based drawing programs are tedious for complex work. We argue that an easy-to-use graphical system tailored for visualization is needed. In this talk, we will present Protovis, an extensible toolkit for constructing visualizations by composing simple graphical primitives. In Protovis, designers specify visualizations as a hierarchy of marks with visual properties de?ned as functions of data. This representation provides a level of expressiveness comparable to low-level graphics systems, while improving ef?ciency--the effort required to specify a visualization--and accessibility--the effort required to learn and modify the representation. We substantiate this claim through a diverse collection of examples and comparative analysis with popular visualization tools.