Comparison of open-source visual analytics toolkits

Abstract

We present the results of the first stage of a two-stage evaluation of open source visual analytics packages. This stage is a broad feature comparison over a range of open source toolkits. Although we had originally intended to restrict ourselves to comparing visual analytics toolkits, we quickly found that very few were available. So we expanded our study to include information visualization, graph analysis, and statistical packages. We examine three aspects of each toolkit: visualization functions, analysis capabilities, and development environments. With respect to development environments, we look at platforms, language bindings, multi-threading/parallelism, user interface frameworks, ease of installation, documentation, and whether the package is still being actively developed.