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There is a growing library of visualization tools being developed (eg on GitHub) - for Stanford's Data-Driven Documents. The implementation languages and standards are the usual W3C suspects: JS, HMTL5, CSS, SVG, JSON etc. Here's some links and examples.

Bostock, M., V. Ogievetsky, and J. Heer, D(3): Data-Driven Documents. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 17(12): p. 2301-9.

  1. Stanford Viz Group. 2012 http://vis.stanford.edu/.
  2. Bubble Chart. 2012 http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/bubble.html.
  3. Dendogram. 2012 http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/cluster.html.
  4. Forced-Directed Graphs. 2012 http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/force.html.
  5. Population Pyramid. 2012 : http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/population.html.
  6. Crossfitters. 2012 http://square.github.com/crossfilter/.

What do MMA users feel is the best strategy for interfacing to this platform , given that MMA and WebMMA are analytic systems but are positioning to overlap the market segment for web-based data visualization.

Likely because MMA is proprietary, the community of MMA users and developers is much smaller than open-source systems, so that visualization libraries built on D3 (but also also include systems like cytoscape.org &c) will have a higher growth rate. Also WRI is only ~500 employees so there's a limit to implementing new functionalities.

My Q is what is the path of least friction to interface MMA analysis code to systems like D3? How to carve the turkey at its joints? This is a soft Q, not expecting code examples, but more comment-driven discussion.

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Can you give an example of a task you want to accomplish? How exactly do you need to interface D3? It would be good to have an example application to start with. – Szabolcs May 10 '12 at 18:14
For example, our team at VA is proposing to use D3 libraries for temporal-based information retrieval and interactive exploration of Health IT data in clinical settings at enterprise scale. These web service will integrate quantitative data, statistical analysis tools as well as the output of Natural Language Processing modules (hence my earlier question about Text bounding boxes and layout engines). The service must be interoperable with a very large data model, rich medical ontologies and application stack currently in development. – alancalvitti May 10 '12 at 18:41
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If you are looking for a discussion you should be looking for another site. The FAQ: "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page. Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much. If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here." – Sjoerd C. de Vries May 10 '12 at 20:04
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The problem is that many (most?) of us know next to nothing about D3 and what it's good for. So in its current form, your question is unlikely to get any useful answers. That's why I asked you to be a bit more specific, go into details, ask about (the feasibility of) implementing something more concrete. Do you use D3? Can you describe some example scenario of using it together with Mathematica? Is all that D3 does plotting and animation, or something more? For static plots, can't we just export SVG from Mathematica? Or does D3 need some special annotations inside the SVG ... – Szabolcs May 11 '12 at 8:23
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... (or some other vector format) to make it possible to animate it (e.g. change colour on mouse hover)? Is something like this you're looking for? Indeed, it would be nice to be able to export some semi-interactive graphs to the web without needing the help of CDF. But my point is: you'll find almost zero D3 expertise on this site. So to get useful answers, it would be good if you could get us started by providing some specific examples (e.g. some simple D3 code that represents something implementable in Mathematica too, and ask about how to export Mma gfx to D3 analogously. – Szabolcs May 11 '12 at 8:27
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