ProVega: A Grammar to Ease the Prototyping, Creation, and Reproducibility of Progressive Data Analysis and Visualization Solutions
Authors
Matteo Filosa (Sapienza University of Rome), Graziano Blasilli (Sapienza University of Rome), Emilio Martino (Sapienza University of Rome), Marco Angelini (Link Campus University)
Presentation
- Session
- Please don't just stare at the picture
- Time
- Tuesday, Nov 10, 11:12 – 11:24 (US/Eastern) · session 10:00 – 11:30
- Location
- Hall America center
Links
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Keywords
Progressive data analysis, progressive visual analytics, progressive visualization, toolkits, declarative specification
Abstract
Modern data analysis requires speed for massive datasets. Progressive Data Analysis and Visualization (PDAV) emerged as a discipline to address this problem, providing fast response times while maintaining interactivity with controlled accuracy. Yet it remains difficult to implement and reproduce. To lower this barrier, we present ProVega, a Vega-Lite-based grammar that simplifies PDAV instrumentation for both simple visualizations and complex visual environments. Alongside it, we introduce Pro-Ex, an editor designed to streamline the creation and analysis of progressive solutions. We validated ProVega by reimplementing 11 exemplars from the literature—verified for fidelity by 39 users—and demonstrating its support for various progressive methods, including data-chunking, process-chunking, and mixed-chunking. An expert user study confirmed the efficacy of ProVega and the Pro-Ex environment in real-world tasks. ProVega, Pro-Ex, and all related materials are available at https://github.com/XAIber-lab/provega
For Practitioners
Progressive-visualization researchers and practitioners building interactive tools for large or slow-to-compute data, data scientists doing exploratory analysis on large datasets, ML practitioners inspecting iterative algorithms (e.g., dimensionality reduction), and developers integrating streaming or simulation backends. PVA/HCI researchers and visualization-grammar developers (Vega-Lite/D3 ecosystem) would be interested in the requirements taxonomy and grammar design itself.