GGobi: evolving from XGobi into an extensible framework for interactive data visualization

GGobi is a direct descendent of a data visualization system called XGobi that has been around since the early 1990s. GGobi's new features include multiple plotting windows, a color lookup table manager, and an Extensible Mark-up Language file format for data. Perhaps the biggest advance is that GGobi can be easily extended, either by being embedded in other software or by the addition of plugins; either way, it can be controlled using an Application Programming Inter-face. An illustration of its extensibility is that it can be embedded in R. The result is a full marriage between GGobi's direct manipulation graphical environment and R's familiar extensible environment for statistical data analysis. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.