NetPanorama: A Declarative Grammar for Network Construction, Transformation, and Visualization

Abstract

This paper introduces NetPanorama, a domain-specific language and declarative grammar for interactive network visualization design that supports multivariate, temporal, and geographic networks. NetPanorama allows users to specify network visualizations as combinations of primitives and building blocks. These support network creation and transformation, including computing metrics; orderings, seriations and layouts; visual encodings, including glyphs, faceting, and label visibility; and interaction for exploration and modifying styling. This approach allows the creation of a range of visualizations including many types of node-link diagrams, adjacency matrices using diverse cell encodings and node orderings, arc diagrams, PivotGraph, small multiples, time-arcs, geographic map visualizations, and hybrid techniques such as NodeTrix. NetPanorama aims to remove the need to use multiple libraries for analysis, wrangling, and visualization. Consequently, NetPanorama supports the agile development of applications for visual exploration of networks and data-driven storytelling. Documentation, source code, further examples, and an interactive online editor can be found online: https://netpanorama.netlify.app/.