1A Refinement Approach to Visualization*

In this paper we present the design for a visualization system appropriate for instantiation in a Software Development Environment(SDE). The design lets the user of the SDE declaratively specify the data to be viewed and its visual rendering, and from that the visualization system generates the visualization. Motivating this work is the acute need for SDEs that can present dynamically-defined visualizations from user-defined, declarative descriptions of the data and its rendering. Our approach is based on the observation that a data rendering is a representation of an abstract data type. This paper applies our previous and ongoing work on data refinement to visualization. We adopt that work to yield a practical, implementable architecture for a visualization system. We illustrate the design on a number of examples