Integrated Visualization Editing via Parameterized Declarative Templates
This work addresses the challenge of integrating diverse visualization tools for users in data analysis, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing grammars like Vega-Lite.
The authors tackled the problem of unifying different visualization creation interfaces by proposing parameterized declarative templates as an abstraction over JSON-based grammars, resulting in a reduction from over 160 charts to about 40 templates and enabling multimodal editing prototypes.
Interfaces for creating visualizations typically embrace one of several common forms. Textual specification enables fine-grained control, shelf building facilitates rapid exploration, while chart choosing promotes immediacy and simplicity. Ideally these approaches could be unified to integrate the user- and usage-dependent benefits found in each modality, yet these forms remain distinct. We propose parameterized declarative templates, a simple abstraction mechanism over JSON-based visualization grammars, as a foundation for multimodal visualization editors. We demonstrate how templates can facilitate organization and reuse by factoring the more than 160 charts that constitute Vega-Lite's example gallery into approximately 40 templates. We exemplify the pliability of abstracting over charting grammars by implementing -- as a template -- the functionality of the shelf builder Polestar (a simulacra of Tableau) and a set of templates that emulate the Google Sheets chart chooser. We show how templates support multimodal visualization editing by implementing a prototype and evaluating it through an approachability study.