Visual Grammars
I’m looking for common standards for modelling data ready for visualisation as graph, tree, various charts etc but not finding much yet. If you know of any standards or places where models are well documented please let me know.
The alternative is to use what appear to be informal conventions such as { nodes [], links: [] } as used by d3 and others for a graph model in JSON.
So far I’ve not found any standards and very few well documented proprietary models. I found:
- a defunct w3c group
- piecemeal proprietary docs
- vizJSON (IBM standard never published, used by RAVE)
- Vega ‘visualisation grammar’ plus oodles of tools, libs,apps etc
Vega and Vega Lite
Vega looks promising - with documented models for a wide range of visualisations and backend and/or client side (Vega Lite) engines to render them. I’ve not had a chance to examine it yet as there is so much to that project. Very interesting indeed:
UPDATE: Vega / Vega Lite look very much what I need (“candidates for a lingua franca of data visualistion”). I’ve been playing, reading and chatting (to Dominik see video) and its both a very useful set of things to use for any visualisation project, and a good basis for my planned visualisation lab. They have their own visualisation lab like tool called Voyager (towards the end of the video) but that and Vega don’t yet overlap with my main area of interest (interaction with, exporation of, and editing of graph data/databases), but the two approaches will fit together very well and enable me and anyone to quickly add support for some very nice visual presentation and analysis, with great UI/UX.
Get up to speed on Vega and Vega Lite in 30 mins with this presentation:
UPDATE2: Vega Voyager
Voyager is an advanced but very easy to use Vega visualisation and analysis application that can be embedded as a component, and which I’ve embedded in a Svelte app.
Here’s a six minute screencase showing Voyager in action:
Here’s the Svelte app which includes Voyager:
UPDATE 3:
I just published an early version of the JSON ViewModel Specification which is being developed along with Visualisation Lab.
Feedback welcome, see: JSON ViewModel Specification · happybeing/visualisation-lab Wiki · GitHub