Building interactive data interfaces is hard because the design of an interface depends on the data processing needs for the underlying analysis task, yet we do not have a good representation for analysis tasks. To fill this gap, this paper advocates for a Data Interface Grammar (DIG) as an intermediate representation of analysis tasks. We show that DIG is compatible with existing data engineering practices, compact to represent any analysis, simple to translate into an interface design, and amenable to offline analysis. We further illustrate the potential benefits of this abstraction, such as automatic interface generation, automatic interface backend optimization, tutorial generation, and workload generation.

翻译：构建交互式数据接口十分困难，因为接口的设计取决于底层分析任务的数据处理需求，然而我们缺乏对分析任务的良好表征。为填补这一空白，本文提出数据接口语法（Data Interface Grammar，DIG）作为分析任务的中间表征。我们证明，DIG 兼容现有数据工程实践，能简洁地表示任意分析任务，可简单地转换为接口设计，并适用于离线分析。我们还进一步阐述了这一抽象概念的潜在优势，例如自动生成接口、自动优化接口后端、生成教程以及生成工作负载。