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arXiv · 2504.08979

A Formalism and Library for Database Visualization

Eugene Wu·Xiang Yu Tuang·Antonio Li·Vareesh Bainwala
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Abstract

Existing data visualization formalisms are restricted to single-table inputs, which makes existing visualization grammars like Vega-lite or ggplot2 tedious to use, have overly complex APIs, and unsound when visualization multi-table data. This paper presents the first visualization formalism to support databases as input -- in other words, *database visualization*. A visualization specification is defined as a mapping from database constraints (e.g., schemas, types, foreign keys) to visual representations of those constraints, and we state that a visualization is *faithful* if it visually preserves the underlying database constraints. This formalism explains how visualization designs are the result of implicit data modeling decisions. We further develop a javascript library called dvl and use a series of case studies to show its expressiveness over specialized visualization systems and existing grammar-based languages.

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Eugene Wu, Xiang Yu Tuang, Antonio Li, Vareesh Bainwala. 2025-04-11. A Formalism and Library for Database Visualization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08979

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