Source: Arvind Satyanarayan, Kanit “Ham” Wongsuphasawat, and Jeffrey Heer, The Lyra Visualization Design Environment (VDE), UW Interactive Data Lab Projects, http://idl.cs.washington.edu/projects/lyra/.

What is Lyra?

Lyra is an interactive environment that enables custom visualization design without writing any code. Graphical “marks” can be bound to data fields using property drop zones; dynamically positioned using connectors; and directly moved, rotated, and resized using handles. Lyra also provides a data pipeline interface for iterative visual specification of data transformations and layout algorithms. Lyra is more expressive than interactive systems like Tableau, allowing designers to create custom visualizations comparable to hand-coded visualizations built with D3 or Processing. These visualizations can then be easily published and reused on the Web.

How Can I Try it Out?

Lyra is available as free and open source software. Try it out or fork it on GitHub.

Note: Lyra is currently alpha software, so beware of bugs! If you experience a bug, please file a bug report.

Is There a Tutorial?

Let’s Make a Bar Chart with Lyra by Jim Vallandingham