plotem

Plotem is a cross-language data visualization library designed to create scientific plots and dashboards. It focuses on performance for large datasets and real-time streams while offering a declarative plotting API that lets users describe data relationships and styles without exposing low-level rendering details.

History: Plotem was initiated in 2016 by researchers and developers at Plotem Labs and released as a public project in 2017. The project adopted an open-source license in 2019 and has since accumulated a diverse contributor base. Major milestones include the introduction of a new rendering backend in 2021 and multi-language bindings in subsequent releases.

Design and features: Plotem provides 2D and 3D plotting capabilities, interactive widgets, and support for streaming data sources. It uses a modular architecture with a core rendering engine written in C++ and language bindings for Python, R, and JavaScript. The API emphasizes declarative construction of plots, responsive interactivity, and theming options. Export formats include SVG, PNG, and PDF, and plots can be embedded in notebooks, web applications, or desktop GUIs.

Usage and ecosystem: Plotem integrates with common data science workflows and tools such as Jupyter notebooks and web dashboards. It supports streaming and dynamic updating of visuals, and provides a plugin system for custom plots and data adapters. The project maintains documentation, examples, and discussion forums, with a distribution model that combines binary wheels and source distributions.

See also: data visualization libraries; plotting libraries; scientific plotting.