Integrated Visualization Editing via Parameterized Declarative Templates

TL;DR

This paper introduces parameterized declarative templates as a unified framework for multimodal visualization editing, enabling organization, reuse, and flexible editing across different visualization forms.

Contribution

It proposes a novel abstraction over JSON-based visualization grammars, demonstrating its effectiveness through template-based implementations of existing tools and a prototype system.

Findings

Templates enable organization and reuse of over 160 Vega-Lite charts.

The approach supports multimodal editing via a prototype system.

Evaluation shows improved approachability for visualization editing.

Abstract

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.