Vega and Vega-Lite are visualization tools implementing a grammar of graphics, similar to

ggplot2 ggplot2 is an open-source data visualization package for the statistical programming language R. Created by Hadley Wickham in 2005, ggplot2 is an implementation of Leland Wilkinson's ''Grammar of Graphics''—a general scheme for data visu ...

. The Vega and Vega-Lite grammars extend

Leland Wilkinson Leland Wilkinson (November 5, 1944 – December 10, 2021) was an American statistician and computer scientist at H2O.ai and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago. Wilkinson developed the SYSTAT statistical ...

's Grammar of Graphics. by adding a novel grammar of interactivity to assist in the exploration of complex datasets. Vega acts as a low-level language suited to explanatory figures (the same use case as

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) sta ...

), while Vega-Lite is a higher-level language suited to rapidly exploring data. Vega is used in the back end of several data visualization systems, for example Voyager. Chart specifications are written in

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other s ...

and rendered in a browser or exported to either vector or bitmap images. Bindings for Vega-Lite have been written for in several programming languages, for example the python package Altair to make it easier to use. The grammars and associated tools are open source projects led by the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab and released under a BSD-3 license

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Visualization software Visualization or visualisation (see spelling differences) is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and ...

Free software programmed in JavaScript JavaScript libraries JavaScript visualization toolkits Software using the BSD license Visualization API