Rapid prototyping of information visualizations using VANISH

Abstract

Discusses a software tool called VANISH (Visualizing And Navigating Information Structured Hierarchically), which supports the rapid prototyping of interactive 2D and 3D information visualizations. VANISH supports rapid prototyping through a special-purpose visual language called VaPL (VANISH Programming Language) tailored for visualizations, through a software architecture that insulates visualization-specific code from changes in both the domain being visualized and the presentation toolkit used, and through the reuse of visualization techniques between application domains. The generality of VANISH is established by showing how it is able to re-create a wide variety of "standard" visualization techniques. VANISH's support for prototyping is shown through an extended example, where we build a C++ class browser, exploring many visualization alternatives in the process.