VOIS library: pushing data science dashboards to the limits

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The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission has set up the JRC Big Data Analytics Platform (BDAP) as a multi-petabyte scale infrastructure to enable EC researchers to process and analyse big data in support to EU policy needs [1]. One of the service layers of the platform is based on Jupyter notebooks and the Python programming language to enable exploratory visualization and interactive analysis of big geospatial and non-geospatial datasets [2]. In this context, we have gained a lot of expertise in the design, development and deploy in production of many complexes Voilà dashboards [3] that enable JRC scientists and research groups to achieve a better communication of their scientific results and policy relevant insights to a non-technical audience as well as the public. Although Voilà Jupyter plugin [4] automatically transforms a notebook into a dashboard, creating an impactful dashboard is still a hard task. Beyond the classical communication issues (regarding, for instance, the story to tell, the message to convey, the graphic elements to use), from a pure web-development point of view, the designers and developers have to clearly define the single-page or multi-page style of the application they want, how to position elements on the page and how to intercept user inputs. One can tackle all these aspects using the standard tools available in the Jupyter world, as for instance the ipywidgets library [5] that provides a basic set of input widget and that is widely used in the data science community. Nevertheless, when a dashboard intends to create a strong impact, we found that it needs to exploit more advanced UI (User-Interface) frameworks. One open-source library recently gained a lot of interest for creating rich and engaging user experiences: ipyvuetify [6]. It is a widget library based on Vuetify/Vue JavaScript library [7] for making modern looking GUI's in Jupyter notebooks and dashboards. It implements the Google material design philosophy…