[IPython-dev] ANN: HoloViews 1.0 released

Jean-Luc Stevens jlstevens at ed.ac.uk
Thu Mar 19 13:35:05 EDT 2015


We are pleased to announce the first public release of HoloViews, a
Python package for scientific and engineering data visualization:

    http://ioam.github.io/holoviews

HoloViews provides composable, sliceable, declarative data structures
for building even complex visualizations easily.

It's designed to exploit the rich ecosystem of scientific Python tools
already available, using Numpy for data storage, matplotlib and mpld3
as plotting backends, and integrating fully with IPython Notebook to
make your data instantly visible.

If you look at the website for just about any other visualization
package, you'll see a long list of pretty pictures, each one of which
has a page or two of code putting it together.  There are pretty
pictures in HoloViews too, but there is *no* hidden code -- *all* of
the steps needed to build a given figure are shown right before the
HoloViews plot, with just a few lines needed for nearly all of our
examples, even complex multi-figure subplots and animations.  This
concise but flexible specification makes it practical to explore and
analyze your data interactively, while leaving a full record for later
reproducibility in the notebook.

It may sound like magic, but it's not -- HoloViews simply lets you
annotate your data with appropriate metadata, and then the data can
display itself!  HoloViews provides a set of general, compositional,
multidimensional data structures suitable for both discrete and
continuous real-world data, and pairs them with separate customizable
plotting classes to visualize them without extensive coding.  A
large collection of continuously tested IPython Notebook tutorials
accompanies HoloViews, showing you precisely the small number of steps
required to generate any of the plots.

Some of the most important features:

- Freely available under a BSD license
- Python 2 and 3 compatible
- Minimal external dependencies -- easy to integrate into your workflow
- Builds figures by slicing, sampling, and composing your data
- Builds web-embeddable animations without any extra coding
- Easily customizable without obscuring the underlying data objects
- Includes interfaces to pandas and Seaborn
- Winner of the 2015 UK Open Source Award

For the rest, check out ioam.github.io/holoviews!

Jean-Luc Stevens
Philipp Rudiger
James A. Bednar

-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.




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