Authoring Combined Textual and Visual Descriptions of Graph Data

Abstract

The interactive linking of text and visualizations supports easy and guided exploration of information and results in a coherent document. Authoring such documents for the web requires writing custom HTML and JavaScript. Existing research aims at reducing the effort by providing a declarative syntax. However, these approaches either do not support the interactive linking of text and visualizations or require advance programming skills to establish this linking. Targeting a specific type of data i.e., graph data, we introduce an approach that uses a declarative syntax to produce interactive documents and requires little to no programming. Based on the user specifications in an HTML file, the system queries the database to retrieve subgraphs and link them to the relevant text fragments. The resulting document consists of a node-link diagram and text; the two representations are closely linked via interactions and word-sized graphics, and provide an active reading experience.