Mosaic: An Architecture for Scalable & Interoperable Data Views

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Keywords

Visualization, Interaction, Scalability, Grammar of Graphics, Software Architecture, Databases

Abstract

Mosaic is an architecture for greater scalability, extensibility, and interoperability of interactive data views. Mosaic decouples data processing from specification logic: clients publish their data needs as declarative queries that are then managed and automatically optimized by a coordinator that proxies access to a scalable data store. Mosaic generalizes Vega-Lite’s selection abstraction to enable rich integration and linking across visualizations and components such as menus, text search, and tables. We demonstrate Mosaic’s expressiveness, extensibility, and interoperability through examples that compose diverse visualization, interaction, and optimization techniques—many constructed using vgplot, a grammar of interactive graphics in which graphical marks act as Mosaic clients. To evaluate scalability, we present benchmark studies with order-of-magnitude performance improvements over existing web-based visualization systems—enabling flexible, real-time visual exploration of billion+ record datasets. We conclude by discussing Mosaic’s potential as an open platform that bridges visualization languages, scalable visualization, and interactive data systems more broadly.