Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics

  • Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat | University of Washington

Vega-Lite is a declarative format for rapidly creating interactive visualizations. The simplest form of a Vega-Lite specification describes a single view–a mapping between data values and the visual properties for a single mark type. These single views can be composed into more complex layered and multi-view displays, or made interactive through a novel grammar of interaction. With Vega-Lite, a diverse range of interactive visualizations–from brushing & linking a scatterplot matrix, to cross-filtering and interactive index charts–can be built with only a few dozen lines of JSON. In these concise specifications, users can omit low-level details such as scale, axes, and legends properties as well as event handling logic, letting the Vega-Lite compiler infer sensible defaults. Under the hood, Vega-Lite leverages Vega’s high-performance dataflow architecture and cross-platform renderers for both SVG and Canvas.

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