Mascot: Manipulable Semantic Components in Data Visualization

Setup Instructions

1. Install NPM
2. Install all local packages - From the terminal run npm install. You need to run this command whenever there are changes to package dependencies.

Build and Run Project

1. To build project one time with npm run build OR build automatically on save with file watching npm run watch. Three outputs (same content, different formats) will be built: mascot-esm.js for modern browsers and bundler usage (import/export), mascot-umd.js for direct usage in browsers (global variable), and mascot-cjs.cjs for Node.js applications (require). No rendering support is included inside mascot-cjs.cjs.

2. To run the in-browser demos, start a server with npm run start (you need to have Python 3 installed), and load localhost:8020 in browser; you can also start the server using Python 2 with the command python -m SimpleHTTPServer <port>

Releasing

1. Ensure all intended changes are committed to main.

2. Run the release script with either:

   • an explicit version (e.g., ./scripts/release.sh 3.1.0), or
   • a SemVer increment keyword (e.g., ./scripts/release.sh patch/minor/major).

Add a Demo to the Gallery

1. Add a new .js file with a descriptive name containing the demo code to the demos folder. If you require sample code, refer to the other demos available in that folder.
2. Any dataset used in your demo should be placed in the corresponding folder in datasets.
3. Add a new entry to _index.json in the demos folder, your key must have the initial letter capitalized and match the name of your .js file.

Citation

Zhicheng Liu, Chen Chen, and John Hooker. Manipulable Semantic Components: A Computational Representation of Data Visualization Scenes. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 31(1):732 – 742, 2025. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456296

Zhicheng Liu, Chen Chen, Francisco Morales, and Yishan Zhao. Atlas: Grammar-based Procedural Generation of Data Visualizations. In 2021 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), pp. 171–175. IEEE, New Orleans, 2021. doi: 10.1109/VIS49827.2021.9623315