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Extending the GGobi pipeline from R

Rapid prototyping of interactive visualizations

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Abstract

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.

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Correspondence to Michael Lawrence.

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Lawrence, M., Wickham, H., Cook, D. et al. Extending the GGobi pipeline from R. Comput Stat 24, 195–205 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-008-0115-y

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