Reactive Data Visualizations

Managing complex data flows and update patterns is one of the most difficult challenges in interactive data visualization. For example, constructing interactive visualizations with multiple linked views can be a daunting task. Functional reactive programming provides approaches for declaratively specifying data dependency graphs and maintaining them automatically. We argue that functional reactive programming is an appropriate and effective abstraction for interactive data visualization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in several visualization examples including multiple linked views. We also provide a catalog of reusable reactive visualization components.