Lenses is a web toolkit that enables the rapid creation of sophisticated data visualizations and interactive graphics. It’s unique because it scales with the person as their knowledge advances. No knowledge of programming is required to get started but the toolkit can be extended and completely customized by developers using HTML and Javascript.
The open source web components A canonical implementation of how the web components would function together which we call the Lens Composer
It’s built around the following core ideas:
- Open source web components which each serve a specific function and can be connected together to grab data from various sources, including APIs that are not accessible to non-programmers in order to transform it from it’s raw form into graphics for the web.
- Extensibility by allowing developers to add new components using HTML, JS, and CSS.
- Data provenance by saving and publishing the workspace used to create the Lens.
- Exploration and publishing are a single step done by a single tool all in the web browser. This shortens the feedback cycle between ideas and results.
There are many data viz tools, unfortunately they all focus on doing very simple graphs and so do not meet the requirements of practitioners in the field, and tie the user to their ecosystem or they require various levels of coding knowledge to create the graphs and integrate them to be published on the web.
Lenses solves both of these issues. It’s easy to get started with it through the drag-and-drop interface and scales up to users who would prefer to create their own unique data visualizations using code. How does it work
It consists of new HTML tags created using web components that can be connected together to fetch, manipulate, and visualize data.
It only requires knowledge of javascript and builds on top of the work of others through the ability to communicate with any RESTful API for data manipulation. That means it is not constrained to any particular toolset you can mix google graphs with high chart graphs and do linear regressions using R studio as long as a web components exists for that. In addition, the value of toolset grows as the community using it expands. Once a new web component is added it can be used by anyone. So if you want to pull data from the twitter api you can use the component for that, run it through a clustering algorithm and show it on a google graph, all without writing any code.
Only write code to do unique things and skip the boiler plate. It’s the same as using libraries except web components are mark-up so they are simpler to use and can be manipulated visually in the browser. In addition, the code that you write for new web components is automatically evaluated in the browser so you shorten the feedback loop between writing code and getting results so you can build better more interesting things.
Interactive graphics journalists who are familiar with HTML, CSS, JS and basic data manipulation for creating data viz.
Run the script at github.com/lenses/script to get the environment set up and follow the guidelines to add new web components.