Section: Software and Platforms

The Obvious Toolkit

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

Information Visualization, Java, Toolkit

Figure 4. The Obvious toolkit showing the same graph with a Prefuse and an IVTK rendering.

The Obvious Toolkit is a new Interactive Graphics Toolkit written in Java to facilitate the interoperability between Information Visualization toolkits and components (Fig. 4 ).

The Obvious Toolkit is an abstraction layer above visualization toolkits. Currently, it connects the most popular toolkits in Java: Prefuse, the InfoVis Toolkit, Improvise, JUNG, as well as other libraries such as the Java Database Communication Toolkit (JDBC) and two Machine-Learning toolkits: Weka and RapidMiner.

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. A paper on Obvious was presented at the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology conference (VAST 2011)  [62] . Obvious is available at http://code.google.com/p/obvious .