S-PLUS Graphlets®

S-PLUS Graphlets are a new way of displaying graphical information on the Web. With S-PLUS Graphlets, you can present your data as any kind of chart with total control over all the details. Better yet, S-PLUS Graphlets allow the viewer to interact with the graphic using the mouse. Your graphics can become live, allowing you to create data mining applications where the viewer can drill down into your data, or create hyperlinked graphics giving the viewer access to further information on other webpages.

Create Web-based Charts

• S-PLUS Graphlets can be created from any kind of chart available in S-PLUS. This includes:
  • Pie charts
    
  • Bar charts
    
  • Histograms
    
  • Line plots and scatterplots
    
  • Time series plots
    
  • Candlestick plots
    
  • High-Low-Open-Close plots
    
  • Box plots
    
  • Dot charts
    
  • Maps and images
    
  • 3-D wireframe plots and 3-D perspective scatterplots
    
  • Custom graphics
    

  With the flexibility of the S-PLUS graphics engine, you have the power to create literally any chart you can imagine, and make it available and interactive on the Web with S-PLUS Graphlets. You can see examples in our Graphlet Gallery.

  S-PLUS Graphlets allow you to add interactivity to your graphs, allowing you to enhance the information-delivery process in ways you never thought imaginable. S-PLUS Graphlets are live objects, and the viewer can interact with the Graphlet by moving and clicking the mouse within the Web browser. With a simple click on a data point or label the viewer can be provided with further information through on-screen information, another Graphlet, or another page anywhere on the World Wide Web. The applications of this interactivity are endless. Here are just a few examples:

  • By clicking on a financial time series chart, show all the news stories relevant to the date where the mouse was clicked
    
  • Make the bars in a bar-chart active, so that clicking on a bar will drill down to display another chart containing only the data in that bar
    
  • Link cities on a map to further detailed charts about that city
    
  • Add interactive labels to a scatter plot to provide more information about your data
    
  • Provide multiple graphs as labelled pages in a single S-PLUS Graphlet, allowing the viewer to browse among the pages at will
    
  • Display latitude and longitude coordinates of the mouse position within an image map, and allow the viewer to zoom in and display a specific region
    
  • The S-PLUS Graphlet window provides further tools for the user to zoom in on selected regions of your graphic to view details. And because
    

  S-PLUS Graphlets -- unlike GIF and JPEG graphics -- are rendered on-the-fly using vector graphics, there is no loss of resolution or pixelation when looking at your graphic "up close and personal".

Creating S-PLUS Graphlets is Quick and Easy

Because Graphlets are implemented using standard Java Applet technology, they can be embedded into any Web page using standard Web authoring tools such as Microsoft FrontPage. Graphlet files are very small (typically 20-60 Kb) so they download quickly across the Web. S-PLUS Graphlets can be viewed on any Java-capable browser, including Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape 4. The S-PLUS Graphlet applet is freely redistributable, so you can give S-PLUS Graphlets to friends and colleagues for use on their Web pages, even if they don't have S-PLUS.

Data Mining and Distributed Analytics With S-PLUS Graphlets

Because an S-PLUS Graphlet can link to further Graphlets, you can provide live data mining on your Web pages. For example, the bars in a bar chart can be linked to further Graphlets displaying the data encapsulated in that bar. Clicking on the bar allows the viewer to drill down into your data, to find just the part of the data that is relevant to his or her needs.

Because Graphlets are rendered independently of S-PLUS, all of the graphics will have to be generated in advance. However, in conjunction S-PLUS Server you can create Graphlet-based applications incorporating a series of linked dynamically-generated graphics displaying up-to-the-second data drawn from a server-based data source. Furthermore, Graphlets can be linked to the analytic capabilities of S-PLUS Server to allow new data analyses to be generated upon interaction with a Graphlet. Because Graphlets are available on the Web, this provides an infinitely flexible framework for distributing OLAP-like graphical and analytical applications amongst colleagues, within your corporation, or around the world. Talk to our Consulting Group about how S-PLUS Graphlets and S-PLUS Server can provide solutions for your distributed data analysis requirements.