Design Patterns for Rapid Visualization Prototyping

In this paper we present three software design patterns for rapid prototyping of information visualization applications. The first pattern describes a mapping of object oriented models to relational data tables used in many visualization frameworks. The second pattern describes a script based approach for the configuration of visualization applications. The third pattern addresses the problem of performing online changes on the visual mapping by enhancing fine-grained mapping operators with scripting capabilities. We present an implementation of the patterns, which is based on the Prefuse toolkit. Finally we discuss some experimental results according to performance issues.