The 2008 Visualization Design Contest: A Functional DSL for Multifield Data

We report results for the 2008 design contest obtained using a novel approach to visualization development. Our ‘visualization system’ is implemented as a domain specific language (DSL) [1] embedded within the purely functional language Haskell. A DSL, or ‘little lan-guage’, provides a simple set of primitives, and combinators for glu-ing these elements into larger structures. In our case the primitives are simple visualization techniques such as isosurfacing, contouring, and probing, and the combinators allow us to assemble multi-variate visu-alizations both as static compositions and animations. As an example: Anim [Draw [ Slice mgreens (zslice 124 t Hp