The InfoVis Toolkit

Version 0.9beta, Nov, 30 2005

by Jean-Daniel Fekete Jean-Daniel.Fekete@inria.fr

INRIA Futurs/ LRI, IN-SITU Project

Introduction
Publications
Downloads
Documentation
Other Toolkits
Acknowledgments

Introduction

The InfoVis Toolkit is a Interactive Graphics Toolkit written in Java to ease the development of Information Visualization applications and components.

The main characteristics of the InfoVis Toolkit are:

Unified data structure: The base data structure is a table of columns. Columns contain objects of homogeneous types, such as integers or strings. Trees and Graphs are derived from Tables.
Small memory footprint: Using homogeneous columns instead of compound types improves dramatically the memory required to store large tables, trees or graphs, and generally the time to manage them.
Unified set of interactive components: Interactive filtering (a.k.a. dynamic queries) can be performed with the same control objects and components regardless of the data structure, simplifying the reuse of existing components and the design of generic ones.
Fast: the InfoVis Toolkit can use accelerated graphics provided by Agile2D, an implementations of Java2D based on the OpenGL API for hardware accelerated graphics. On machine with hardware acceleration, some visualizations redisplay 100 times faster than with the standard Java2D implementation.
Extensible: the InfoVis Toolkit is meant to incorporate new information visualization techniques and is distributed with the full sources and with a very liberal licence. It could be a base for student projects, reseach projects or commercial products.

Visualizations

The InfoVis Toolkit, as of version 0.9, implements nine (9) types of visualization: Scatter Plots, Time Series, Parallel Coordinates and Matrices for tables; Node-Link diagrams, Icicle trees and Treemaps for trees; Adjacency Matrices and Node-Link diagrams for graphs. Node-Link visualizations provides several variants (8 for graphs and 4 for trees).

The framework has been designed to support this versatility so, if you see a problem or improvements when trying to implement your own visualizations, let me know so that I can improve the Toolkit.

Publications

Jean-Daniel Fekete, The InfoVis Toolkit, in Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis'04), IEEE Press, 2004, pp. 167-174.

Jean-Daniel Fekete, The InfoVis Toolkit, Research Report RR-4818, INRIA Futurs, May 2003.