Vega and Vega-Lite visualisation grammars
Graphics software tools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vega and Vega-Lite are visualization tools implementing a grammar of graphics, similar to ggplot2. The Vega and Vega-Lite grammars extend Leland Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics[2] by adding a novel grammar of interactivity to assist in the exploration of complex datasets.
| Vega and Vega-Lite | |
|---|---|
 Vega (top), Vega-Lite (bottom) | |
| Developers | Jeffrey Heer, Arvind Satyanarayan, Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat, and community |
| Release | 2 April 2013 |
| Stable release | 6.0.0
/ 27 March 2025[1] |
| Written in | JavaScript |
| Type | Data visualization, JavaScript library |
| License | BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License |
| Website | vega |
Vega acts as a low-level language suited to explanatory figures (the same use case as D3.js), while Vega-Lite is a higher-level language suited to rapidly exploring data.[3] Vega is used in the backend of several data visualization systems, for example Voyager.[4][5] Chart specifications are written in JSON and rendered in a browser or exported to either vector or bitmap images. Bindings for Vega-Lite have been written in several programming languages, such as the Python package Altair.[6] The grammars and associated tools are open source projects led by the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab and released under a BSD-3 license.[7]