Exploration and analysis of high-dimensional data are important tasks in many fields that produce large and complex data, like the financial sector, systems biology, or cultural heritage. Tailor-made visual analytics software is developed for each specific application, limiting their applicability in other fields. However, as diverse as these fields are, their characteristics and requirements for data analysis are conceptually similar. Many applications share abstract tasks and data types and are often constructed with similar building blocks. Developing such applications, even when based mostly on existing building blocks, requires significant engineering efforts. We developed ManiVault, a flexible and extensible open-source visual analytics framework for analyzing high-dimensional data. The primary objective of ManiVault is to facilitate rapid prototyping of visual analytics workflows for visualization software developers and practitioners alike. ManiVault is built using a plugin-based architecture that offers easy extensibility. While our architecture deliberately keeps plugins self-contained, to guarantee maximum flexibility and re-usability, we have designed and implemented a messaging API for tight integration and linking of modules to support common visual analytics design patterns. We provide several visualization and analytics plugins, and ManiVault's API makes the integration of new plugins easy for developers. ManiVault facilitates the distribution of visualization and analysis pipelines and results for practitioners through saving and reproducing complete application states. As such, ManiVault can be used as a communication tool among researchers to discuss workflows and results. A copy of this paper and all supplemental material is available at https://osf.io/9k6jw and source code at https://github.com/ManiVaultStudio.

翻译：高维数据的探索与分析是金融领域、系统生物学或文化遗产等产生大规模复杂数据的多个领域中的重要任务。针对特定应用开发的定制化可视分析软件，限制了其在其他领域的适用性。然而，尽管这些领域千差万别，其数据特征与分析需求在概念上具有相似性。许多应用共享抽象任务与数据类型，并常基于相似构建模块进行架构。即便主要依托现有构建模块，开发此类应用仍需大量工程投入。我们研发了ManiVault——一个灵活可扩展的开源高维数据可视分析框架。ManiVault的核心目标是帮助可视化软件开发者与从业者快速构建可视分析工作流原型。该框架采用基于插件的架构设计，具备易于扩展的特性。在刻意保持插件独立性的同时（以确保最大灵活性与可复用性），我们设计并实现了消息传递API，用于实现模块间紧密集成与联动，以支持通用可视分析设计模式。框架内嵌了多种可视化与分析插件，且其API便于开发者集成新插件。通过保存与复现完整的应用状态，ManiVault支持从业者分发可视化分析管线及结果。因此，ManiVault可作为研究人员交流工作流与成果的协同工具。本文及所有补充材料见 https://osf.io/9k6jw，源代码见 https://github.com/ManiVaultStudio。