Building Highly-Coordinated Visualizations in Improvise

Improvise is a fully-implemented system in which users build and browse multiview visualizations interactively using a simple shared-object coordination mechanism coupled with a flexible, expression-based visual abstraction language. By coupling visual abstraction with coordination, users gain precise control over how navigation and selection in the visualization affects the appearance of data in individual views. As a result, it is practical to build visualizations with more views and richer coordination in Improvise than in other visualization systems. Building and browsing activities are integrated in a single, live user interface that lets users alter visualizations quickly and incrementally during data exploration

1 Introduction

Visualization systems have matured into full-featured development environments that enable users to build visualizations with multiple coordinated views rapidly. In these systems, users coordinate views either by using a small set of pre-defined coordinations or by writing scripts. The choice between these two approaches is a tradeoff between simplicity and flexibility.