Flexible Information Visualization Components for Authoring WWW Live Documents

This paper illustrates how simple information visualization components can be easily utilized by authors to create powerful interactive “live” documents, or LiveDocs. LiveDocs take advantage of the unique capabilities of the Web as a publishing medium by supporting readers on a network in interacting with visualizations and algorithms for analyzing the data the document discusses. Accessibility to busy readers lacking experience with sophisticated visualization systems is a critical feature for LiveDocs, and we illustrate how setting initial states for our components allows LiveDocs to function as ordinary static documents. In addition, we provide a simple interface for specifying LiveDocs, thereby allowing authors to easily incorporate LiveDoc components into their documents. Finally, our components can be linked together to provide powerful visualization applications. We illustrate these properties with sample LiveDocs used to report results from a real-life study of software evolution.