Coordinated views in dynamic interactive documents

Traditional documents are characterized by the paper medium, presented in hierarchical chapter structures, passive for the reader and basically linear readable and normally restricted to static items such as text, imagery and sometimes animations. Integrating existing visualization methods with innovative documentation technology can increase the quality of information in technical documents. We have developed dynamic and interactive documents that incorporate not only text but also the entire interactive data visualisation and navigation process. Authors can produce electronic documents that collaborate and share data, analysis, visualization parameters, information and insight while distributed over the Internet, using intuitive visual navigation techniques. Using multiple coordinated views in a dynamic document will further help the reader to explore complex, multivariate data and discover their relationships. Visual data navigation is provided through interactive 2D and 3D visualisation components based on scalable and customisable, multilayer component architecture with a small footprint suitable for Web distribution. A "Viewer" client-side plug-in, responsible for data interactivity and visualization, is distributed as freeware to allow free distribution of dynamic documents over any network.