VizDSL: A visual DSL for interactive information visualization

Abstract

The development of systems of systems or the replacement of processes or systems can create unknowns, risks, delays and costs which are difficult to understand and characterise, and which frequently result in unforeseen issues resulting in overspend or avoidance. Yet maintaining state of the art processes and systems and utilising best of breed component systems is essential. Visualization of disparate data, systems, processes and standards can help end users to understand relationships such as class hierarchy or communication across system components better. There are many visualization tools and libraries available but they are either a black box when it comes to specifying possible interactions between end users and the visualization or require significant programming skills and manual effort to implement. In this paper we propose a visual language called VizDSL that is based on the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) for creating highly interactive visualizations. VizDSL can be used to model, share and implement interactive visualization based on model-driven engineering principles. The language has been evaluated based on interaction patterns for visualizations.