Creating reusable visualizations with the Relational Visualization Notation

Richly expressive information visualizations are difficult to design and rarely found. Few software tools can generate multidimensional visualizations at all, let alone incorporate artistic detail. Although, it is a great efficiency to reuse these visualizations with new data, the associated artistic detail is rarely reusable. The Relational Visualization Notation is a new technique and toolkit for specifying highly expressive graphical representations of data without traditional programming. We seek to discover the accessible power of this notation, both its graphical expressiveness and its ease of re-use. Towards this end we have used the system to reconstruct Minard's visualization of Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812. The resulting image is strikingly similar to the original, and the design is straightforward to construct. Furthermore, the design permitted by the notation can be directly reused to visualize Hitler's WWII defeat before Moscow. This experience leads us to believe that artistically expressive visualizations can be made to be reusable.