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Show HN: Graphic-Walker – A different type of open-source alternative to Tableau (github.com)

148 points by loa_observer ↗ HN
Hello, guys~ I recently developed a data exploration and visualization app which can be used as a different type of open-source alternative to Tableau. It is extremely easy to embed in your apps just as a react component. The original purpose is to develop a lite plugin that can be easily embedded in most cases, it doesn't have to be a large BI, but a lite graphic plugin.

GitHub: Kanaries/graphic-walker, https://github.com/Kanaries/graphic-walker

The main features implemented: * A user-friendly drag-and-drop-based interaction for exploratory data analysis with visualizations. * A grammar of graphics-based visual analytic user interface where users can build visualization from low-level visual channel encodings. * A Data Explainer explains why some patterns occur / what may cause them. * Using web workers to handle computation tasks which allows you to use it as a pure front-end app. And you can use it in your app as a react component:h me in github or discord.

Feedbacks and advice are welcome! Discuss with me in github or discord!

12 comments

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ensemblehq
Perfect timing as I'm looking for something like this (was going to build this but happy to contribute!). I'll give it a go! Thanks!
dafelst
This looks cool, but hopefully does not run afoul of Tableau's (and now Salesforce's) many patents in that space.

IIRC part of the reason certain features couldn't make it into Microsoft's PowerBI was because of those.

tomalaci
You can patent data visualization ideas!? And those can be actually reinforced? You gotta be kidding me.

I thought there was a condition that for patent to be valid it must not be an idea that someone else can easily come up with.

fourthark
Yes, it must not be an "obvious" idea.

However, they must use too narrow a definition of obvious, because many obvious things have software patents.

Moissanite
If this is indeed the case, it's just one more nugget of data to support the view that patent systems are utterly broken. There is nothing novel or inventive about these kinds of BI tools which warrants 20+ years of protected monopoly.
freeman478
Interesting area and well done on the work !

Have you looked at https://perspective.finos.org/ ? It has at least some overlaps and can manage pretty big datasets by levering Arrow in WASM in the browser.

loa_observer
It's a cool project, thanks for sharing. graphic-walker focuses more on a Grammar of Graphics based graphic system, not a chart-based system.

But for performance in the browser, I am also researching ways to handle large datasets in the browser, such as duckdb-wasm.

Another project I am working on, called RATH is facing more challenging performance issues because it is designed to automate the exploration of data to find insights and causal relations by machine. It currently is using web worker and indexedDB to implement a lite cube service in the browser, but it is not enough.

https://github.com/kanaries/rath

Thanks for your advice, I will continue to improve the both computation and render performance in browser.

pqyzwbq
I checked rath some days ago, it is pretty cool. It's great to know graphic-walker.

by the way, for RATH's automated data exploration, it seems like https://github.com/rilldata/rill-developer project.

loa_observer
Besides automated data profiling, RATH focuses more on EDA, especially good at high-dimensional cases. It can generate visualization with insights about complex relations of multi variables (for example, 6 vars).

You can find the difference of RATH in mega/semi-automation module(based on predictive interaction), and in data painter, and causal analysis as well.