Extending the GGobi pipeline from R: Rapid Prototyping of Interactive Visualizations

This paper describes progress towards developing a platform for rapid prototyping of interactive data visualizations, using R, GGobi, rggobi and RGtk2. GGobi is a software tool for multivariate interactive graphics. At the core of GGobi is a data pipeline that incrementally transforms data through a series of stages into a plot and maps user interaction with the plot back to the data. The GGobi pipeline is extensible and mutable at runtime. The rggobi package, an interface from the R language to GGobi, has been augmented with a low-level interface that supports the customization of interactive data visualizations through the extension and manipulation of the GGobi pipeline. The large size of the GGobi API has motivated the use of the RGtk2 code generation system to create the low-level interface between R and GGobi. The software is demonstrated through an application to interactive network visualization.

@Article{pipeline,
  author = {Michael Lawrence and Hadley Wickham and Dianne Cook and Heike Hofmann and Deborah F. Swayne},
  doi = {10.1007/s00180-008-0115-y},
  journal = {Computational Statistics},
  note = {Special issue for Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Directions in Statistical Computing.},
  number = {2},
  pages = {195–205},
  title = {Extending the GGobi pipeline from R: Rapid Prototyping of Interactive Visualizations},
  volume = {24},
  year = {2009},
  bdsk-url-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00180-008-0115-y},
}