VisAxes - Axes-Based Visualization

Featuring Time Wheel, Parallel Coordinates, Kiviat Graph, Plot Wheel, Scatter Plot Matrix and more

Christian Tominski
University of Rostock, 2003-2025

About

VisAxes is a visualization framework that is based on two key components: axes representing data dimensions and drawings between axes representing data items. The axes (i.e., dimensions) can be arranged in different ways (e.g., parallel axes, radial axes, axes grid), and depending on the arrangement, data items can be drawn in different ways (e.g., poly lines, star shapes, dots). Designed as a general framework, VisAxes can generate Parallel Coordinates Plots, Kiviat Plots, Scatter Plots, Scatter Plot Matrices, or TimeWheel visualizations. The general model behind VisAxes has later been published by Claessen and van Wijk (2011) under the name of Flexible Linked Axes. A specialty of VisAxes is that it offers different types of interactive axes that allow direct zooming and scrolling as well as focus+context visual mappings. The software also includes a TableLens visualization.

Publications

C. Tominski, J. Abello, and H. Schumann. Axes-Based Visualizations with Radial Layouts. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), Nicosia, Cyprus, ACM, 2004.
C. Tominski, J. Abello, and H. Schumann. Interactive Poster: Axes-Based Visualizations for Time Series Data. Poster at IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis), Seattle, USA, 2003.

Gallery

Download

Kept-alive version (as of June 2025), adapted to run on high-DPI displays.
Download VisAxes incl. sample data.
You will need Windows and the .NET Framework 4.8 to run VisAxes!

Data Requirements

The first line in a data file must contain unique attribute names separated by semicolon
The second line contains the data types of the attributes also separated by semicolon
Valid data types are "String", "Real", "Integer", "Category", and "Date"
The rest of the lines contains the actual data
Note that a temporal reference is only recognized if "Date" is the first attribute in the file
Further note that the tool is not very cooperative with respect to duplicate attribute identifiers, missing values, or too many separators, so be careful when preparing your data

Example:

Date;AvgTemp;Precipitation;RelHumidity
Date;Real;Real;Integer
1893-01-01;-10.6;0;79
1893-01-02;-12.9;0.1;97
1893-01-03;-12;3.2;85
...