Smartgraph--A Visual Language for Statistical Graphics

Statistical graphics are used extensively by medical researchers to aid in understanding their datavisualizations require customization, current graphics software remains difficult for the novice topredefined and limited ways, and even software experts can spend inordinate amounts of time in custothat the desired graphic can be generated, its composition often requires a trial and error processnew datasets - there is an unfulfilled need for rapid prototyping of statistical graphics programs.environments tend to be either difficult to program, or inflexible to customize, or both. The proposenvironment, SMARTGRAPH, uses modern iconic visual programming language techniques to produce WYSIWYgraphics by direct manipulation of either the graph or its iconic representation. Once a customizedproduced, the environment uses programming-by-demonstration technology (a recent innovation in compuresearch) to produce a textual function which can replicate the graphic with the same or new data. Tguidance, and programming-by-demonstration features available in SMARTGRAPH will be valuable to bothexpert programmers, and will increase the quality of statistical visualizations.