In multiple coordinated views (MCVs), visualizations across views update their content in response to users’ interactions in other views. Interactive systems provide direct manipulation to create coordination between views, but are restricted to limited types of predefined templates. By contrast, textual specification languages enable flexible coordination but expose technical burden. To bridge the gap, we contribute Nebula, a grammar based on natural language for coordinating visualizations in MCVs. The grammar design is informed by a novel framework based on a systematic review of 176 coordinations from existing theories and applications, which describes coordination by demonstration, i.e., how coordination is performed by users. With the framework, Nebula specification formalizes coordination as a composition of user- and coordination-triggered interactions in origin and destination views, respectively, along with potential data transformation between the interactions. We evaluate Nebula by demonstrating its expressiveness with a gallery of diverse examples and analyzing its usability on cognitive dimensions.

中文翻译：

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星云：图形的协调语法


在多个协调视图 (MCV) 中，跨视图的可视化会更新其内容以响应用户在其他视图中的交互。交互式系统提供直接操作以在视图之间创建协调，但仅限于有限类型的预定义模板。相比之下，文本规范语言可以实现灵活的协调，但会带来技术负担。为了弥补这一差距，我们贡献了 Nebula，一种基于自然语言的语法，用于协调 MCV 中的可视化。语法设计基于一个新颖的框架，该框架基于对现有理论和应用中的 176 个协调的系统回顾，该框架通过演示来描述协调，即用户如何执行协调。通过该框架，星云规范将协调形式化为原始视图和目标视图中用户触发的交互和协调触发的交互的组合，以及交互之间潜在的数据转换。我们通过一系列不同的例子展示其表现力并分析其在认知维度上的可用性来评估星云。