Bluefish: Composing Diagrams with Declarative Relations
Josh Pollock, Catherine Mei, Grace Huang, Elliot Evans, Daniel, Jackson, Arvind Satyanarayan

TL;DR
Bluefish is a flexible diagramming framework that uses declarative relations to compose diverse diagrams across multiple domains, addressing limitations of existing tools.
Contribution
It introduces a relation-based diagramming approach inspired by UI libraries, enabling flexible, composable, and extensible diagram creation.
Findings
Bluefish effectively supports diverse domain-specific diagrams.
Relations serve as powerful declarative primitives for diagram composition.
The system is open source and suitable for research and practical use.
Abstract
Diagrams are essential tools for problem-solving and communication as they externalize conceptual structures using spatial relationships. But when picking a diagramming framework, users are faced with a dilemma. They can either use a highly expressive but low-level toolkit, whose API does not match their domain-specific concepts, or select a high-level typology, which offers a recognizable vocabulary but supports a limited range of diagrams. To address this gap, we introduce Bluefish: a diagramming framework inspired by component-based user interface (UI) libraries. Bluefish lets users create diagrams using relations: declarative, composable, and extensible diagram fragments that relax the concept of a UI component. Unlike a component, a relation does not have sole ownership over its children nor does it need to fully specify their layout. To render diagrams, Bluefish extends a…
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Taxonomy
TopicsData Visualization and Analytics · Semantic Web and Ontologies · Data Management and Algorithms
