IPyOverlay

IPyOverlay is a library of IPyWidget "wrapper components" that support rendering widgets on top of other widgets with arbitrary/controllable positioning. This allows interfaces with overlay elements, e.g. pop-up windows, custom context menus, etc.

The intent is to provide the mechanisms necessary to implement more complex details-on-demand functionality (one part of the visual information-seeking mantra published in The Eyes Have it: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations), for dashboards and visualizations that allow a user to hone in and get more in-depth information or additional plots when requested.

Installation

IPyOverlay can be installed via pip with:

pip install ipyoverlay

Documentation

User guide and API documentation can be found at https://ornl.github.io/ipyoverlay

Screenshots

A GIF demoing interaction with an ipympl Matplotlib figure. In the demo, Clicking a cluster opens a pop-up window with a new figure.

The background Matplotlib figure shown is rendered as an interactive ipympl widget and wrapped in IPyOverlay’s OverlayContainer, and shows a UMAP of clustered embeddings. Clicking a cluster or right-clicking and selecting an exhibit creates a click-and-draggable pop-up window containing a new visualization that plots more details for the selected cluster. Optionally, each pop-up window can show a line connecting the window to the center of the cluster it is associated with in the underlying figure.

Custom actions can be added as A right-click menu to any widget. This menu is specific to this Matplotlib UMAP and allows users to choose whether to open a violin or distribution plot for the hovered cluster.

If multiple separate “background” widgets (Matplotlib UMAP on the left and Plotly map on the right) are wrapped in an OverlayContainer, overlay widgets can be displayed and dragged over all of them.

Citation

To cite usage of IPyOverlay, you can use the following bibtex:

@misc{doecode_127817,
    title = {IPyOverlay},
    author = {Martindale, Nathan and Smith, Jacob and Linville, Lisa and Hite, Jason and Adams, Mark and Stewart, Scott},
    abstractNote = {IPyOverlay is a Python library that provides several IPyWidget components for use within the Jupyter software ecosystem. These components add novel UI capabilities to enable details-on-demand interaction paradigms by providing the ability to render widgets on top of other widgets with arbitrary and controllable positioning. This capability enables adding click-and-draggable overlay windows containing other widgets, right-click context menus, and more complex tooltip functionality.},
    doi = {10.11578/dc.20240530.1},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.11578/dc.20240530.1},
    howpublished = {[Computer Software] \url{https://doi.org/10.11578/dc.20240530.1}},
    year = {2024},
    month = {may}
}