Vega and Vega-Lite visualisation grammars

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 (top), Vega-Lite (bottom)
Developer(s)	Jeffrey Heer, Arvind Satyanarayan, Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat, and community
Initial release	2 April 2013; 11 years ago (2013-04-02)
Stable release	5.25.0 / 27 April 2023; 22 months ago (2023-04-27)[1]
Written in	JavaScript
Type	Data visualization, JavaScript library
License	BSD
Website	vega.github.io

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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 back end 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] to make it easier to use. 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]