ReVize: A library for visualization toolchaining with vega-lite

Abstract

The field of tools for data visualization has been growing in recent years, with each tool contributing new ways to create and work with visualizations, and each offering a specialized set of features, interaction metaphors and user interfaces. This means on one hand that users have a wide choice in visualization tools. On the other hand, though, this choice might also lock-in the user: Once made, it becomes difficult and sometimes even impossible to switch to another tool - e.g., to further refine a visualization made in one tool inside another. In turn, users are forced to work around any shortcomings of the chosen tool, as switching to another tool is even more cumbersome. In this paper, we introduce ReVize, an open-source library for visualization toolchaining. ReVize makes use of Vega-Lite as a common exchange format to be able to add toolchain support to web-based tools. In contrast to existing approaches, this solution to visualization toolchaining allows for authoring a visualization with multiple tools in a back-and-forth fashion, without a preset order in which tools are to be used. We demonstrate ReVize by adding toolchain support to three existing tools - KNIME, ColorBrewer, and VisFlow - for using them in concert to author visualizations.