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Section: Software

The Obvious Toolkit

Participants : Pierre-Luc Hémery, Jean-Daniel Fekete [correspondant] .

Figure 1. The Obvious toolkit showing the same graph with a Prefuse and an IVTK rendering.
IMG/obvious.png

The Obvious Toolkit is a new Interactive Graphics Toolkit written in Java to facilitate the interoperability between Information Visualization toolkits and components (Fig. 1 ).

The Obvious Toolkit is an abstraction layer above visualization toolkits. Currently, it connects the most popular toolkits in Java: Prefuse, the InfoVis Toolkit, Improvise, as well as other libraries such as the Java Database Communication Toolkit (JDBC) and some others.

It is meant to provide an abstraction layer for information visualization application builders so that they can postpone their choice of a concrete toolkit to use. When faced with the final choice, application builders can use one of the toolkits or connect all of them dynamically to Obvious. Obvious is available at http://code.google.com/p/obvious . A paper on Obvious was presented at the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology conference (VAST 2011).