Pyxis

Pyxis is a specification language for defining visual analysis objectives, insights, and tasks in a programmatic way that is consistent with the academic literature.

Research Team

This project is the work of Prof. Leilani Battle, Co-Director of the UW Interactive Data Lab, and Alvitta Ottley, Director of the Visual Data Analysis Group at WashU.

Citing Pyxis

This project was published as a full paper in the TVCG journal (presented at VIS 2024). Preliminary work was published as a short paper at VIS 2023. If you would like to cite this work, please use the following:

@article{battle2024what,
  author={Battle, Leilani and Ottley, Alvitta},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics}, 
  title={What Do We Mean When We Say "Insight"? A Formal Synthesis of Existing Theory}, 
  year={2024},
  volume={30},
  number={9},
  pages={6075-6088},
  doi={10.1109/TVCG.2023.3326698}
}

Setting Pyxis Up Locally

You will need to have both TypeScript and Yarn installed prior to setting up Pyxis. The following instructions assume you have already installed TypeScript and Yarn, and are currently in the Pyxis root folder.

To install all package dependencies for Pyxis run:

yarn

Assuming the installation was successful, to build everything and copy the datasets to the build folder run:

yarn build

To build the source code only run:

yarn build-src

To build the examples only run:

yarn build-examples

To copy the datasets to the build folder run:

yarn build-datasets

Testing Pyxis

Make sure the code builds and the tests run properly before trying the examples. To run tests and do linting run:

yarn test

All tests should pass. You may see a few warnings from eslint, but this is fine.

Running the Examples

The codebase contains examples of how to specify all of the major components of Pyxis, including concepts, instances, domain knowledge nodes, data transformations, data relationships, analytic knowledge nodes, insights, and tasks.

To run any of our existing examples, you can do the following (assuming you are currently in the root folder for Pyxis):

node build-test/examples/[path to example].js

Here is an example of running the Amar et al. usage scenario from the paper:

node build-test/examples/use_cases/amar.js