Improvise
Exploratory visualization based on multiple coordinated views is a rapidly growing area of information visualization. Ideally, users would be able to explore their data by switching freely between building and browsing in a flexible, integrated, interactive graphical environment that requires little or no programming skill to use. However, the possibilities for displaying data across multiple views depends on the flexibility of coordination, the expressiveness of graphical encoding, and the ability of users to comprehend the structure of their visualizations as they work. As a result, exploration has been limited in practice to a small fraction of useful visualizations.
Improvise is a fully-implemented Java software architecture and user interface that enables users to build and browse highly-coordinated visualizations interactively. By coupling a shared-object coordination model with a declarative visual query language, users gain precise control over how navigation and selection affects the appearance of data across multiple views, using a potentially infinite number of variations on well-known coordination patterns such as synchronized scrolling, overview+detail, brushing, drill-down, and semantic zoom.
Improvise has been used to build numerous visualizations for exploring information including election results, particle trajectories, network loads, music collections, the chemical elements, and even the dynamic coordination structure of its own visualizations in situ. This last technique—integrated metavisualization—is unique to Improvise.