RAWGraphs is a web-based open-source data visualization software made in

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

. It employs

D3.js D3.js (also known as D3, short for Data-Driven Documents) is a JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers. It makes use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), HTML5, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) stan ...

for the creation of editable visualizations in SVG format.

History

The project was started in 2013 by a group of researchers of

Politecnico di Milano The Polytechnic University of Milan (, abbreviated as PoliMi) is a university in Milan, Italy. It is the largest technical university in the country, with about 40,000 enrolled students. The university offers undergraduate, graduate, and higher ...

with the original name of "RAW". Version 1.0.0 was released in 2014. In the same year the tool won the "Most Beautiful" award at the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards 2014 organized by

David McCandless David McCandless (born 1971) is a British data-journalist, writer and information designer. Career McCandless is the founder of the visual blog ''Information Is Beautiful''. Early explorations into the synergy between data visualisation and his ...

. In 2017 the project was re-launched thanks to private support. It changed the license from

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

to Apache 2 and the project name to "RAWGraphs". In August 2019 the team launched a crowdfunding campaign to harvest economical support for developing a new version of the tool. Version 2.0.0 was released in September 2020 to backers, and publicly in February 2021. The new version presents a modular architecture composed by a core

library, an expandable library of visual models, and a web-based GUI written in React.

Applications

RAWGraphs has been used in a number of research projects in academia, and is used also by journalist and graphic designer thanks to its ability of creating clean, SVG-based images that can be further edited with any other software.

Available charts

In version 2.0 the available charts are: * Alluvial diagram * Arc diagram *

Bar chart A bar chart or bar graph is a chart or graph that presents categorical variable, categorical data with rectangular bars with heights or lengths proportional to the values that they represent. The bars can be plotted vertically or horizontally. A ...

** Multi-set bar chart ** Stacked bar chart * Beeswarm plot *

Box plot In descriptive statistics, a box plot or boxplot is a method for demonstrating graphically the locality, spread and skewness groups of numerical data through their quartiles. In addition to the box on a box plot, there can be lines (which are ca ...

* Bumpchart *

Circle packing In geometry, circle packing is the study of the arrangement of circles (of equal or varying sizes) on a given surface such that no overlapping occurs and so that no circle can be enlarged without creating an overlap. The associated ''packing den ...

* Dendrograms: ** Circular dendrogram ** Linear dendrogram *

Gantt chart A Gantt chart is a bar chart that illustrates a schedule (project management), project schedule. It was designed and popularized by Henry Gantt around the years 1910–1915. Modern Gantt charts also show the Dependency (project management), depe ...

* Horizon graph *

Line chart A line chart or line graph, also known as curve chart, is a type of chart that displays information as a series of data points called 'markers' connected by straight wikt:line, line segments. It is a basic type of chart common in many fields. ...

* Matrix Plot *

Parallel coordinates Parallel Coordinates plots are a common method of visualizing high-dimensional datasets to analyze multivariate data having multiple variables, or attributes. To plot, or visualize, a set of points in ''n''-dimensional space, ''n'' parallel l ...

Radar chart A radar chart is a graphical method of displaying multivariate data in the form of a two-dimensional chart of three or more quantitative variables represented on axes starting from the same point. The relative position and angle of the axes i ...

Sankey diagram Sankey diagrams are a data visualisation technique or flow diagram that emphasizes flow/movement/change from one state to another or one time to another, in which the width of the arrows is proportional to the flow rate of the depicted extensiv ...

* Scatterplots: **

Bubble chart A bubble chart is a type of chart that displays three dimensions of data. Each entity with its triplet (''v''1, ''v''2, ''v''3) of associated data is plotted as a disk that expresses two of the ''vi'' values through the disk's ''xy'' location and ...

Contour plot A contour line (also isoline, isopleth, isoquant or isarithm) of a function of two variables is a curve along which the function has a constant value, so that the curve joins points of equal value. It is a plane section of the three-dimensi ...

over bubble chart **

Convex hull In geometry, the convex hull, convex envelope or convex closure of a shape is the smallest convex set that contains it. The convex hull may be defined either as the intersection of all convex sets containing a given subset of a Euclidean space, ...

grouping ** Hexagonal binning grouping *

Streamgraph A streamgraph, or stream graph, is a type of stacked area chart, area graph which is displaced around a Cartesian coordinate system, central axis, resulting in a flowing, organic shape. Unlike a traditional stacked area graph in which the layers a ...

(also known as

Area chart An area chart or area graph displays graphically quantitative data. It is based on the line chart. The area between axis and line are commonly emphasized with colors, textures and hatchings. Commonly one compares two or more quantities with an a ...

) * Sunburst diagram *

Treemap In information visualization and computing, treemapping is a method for displaying hierarchical data using Nesting (computing), nested figures, usually rectangles. Treemaps display hierarchical (Tree (data structure), tree-structured) data as a ...

Violin plot The violin, sometimes referred to as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone, and is the smallest, and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in regular use in the violin family. Smaller violin-type instruments exist, including the violino pic ...

Voronoi Diagram In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a partition of a plane into regions close to each of a given set of objects. It can be classified also as a tessellation. In the simplest case, these objects are just finitely many points in the plane (calle ...

Data Inputs

the software can load data from the following sources: * static files ( CSV, TSV, Excel files) * Data from endpoints (in tabular or

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...

format) * Data from

SPARQL SPARQL (pronounced ":wikt:sparkle, sparkle", a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is an RDF query language—that is, a Semantic Query, semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data sto ...

endpoints (e.g.

Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain ...

)

References

{{Portal, Free and open-source software Free application software Free data and information visualization software