LIVE lets anyone build
"Linkable Interactive Visualization and Exploration" Environments.

LIVE is free, open-source, and helps with shared data and visualization challenges across astronomy (LIVE Astro), biology (LIVE Bio) and GIS (LIVE GIS).

As LIVE's infrastructure is being built, collaborators are ensuring its utility across Astronomy, Biology, and GIS by pursuing LIVE's science demonstration projects.

LIVE is focused on bringing high-powered data exploration to the browser, in flavors ranging from simple tools intended for learners or single-purpose tasks to hybrid command-line/GUI interfaces built on Jupyter tools.  It's distinguished from commercially-available tools by its ability to handle many data formats (e.g. high-resolution/big images, data cubes) not commonly used in the business world, by its ability to connect extant javascript tools to each other, and also by its open-source nature. 

Combining the glue linked-view visualization system with Jupyter and Solara frameworks, LIVE is integrating tools from across the open-source community, providing support for diverse data formats, plot styles, and analysis methods all within a single ecosystem of connected tools.

Have a look at the Capabilities and Tech pages to learn more about what's happening, and at the team page to see who's behind this.  "Learn More" offers explanatory talks and information about support. 

Please do drop us a note if you'd like to join in! 

LIVE is customizable.  LIVE Astro, LIVE Bio, and LIVE GIS already understand many data formats, and know how to connect data sets--but LIVE's plug-in approach means you can add new formats too.  Similarly, the LIVE suite offers a wide variety of plots, displays, and analysis tools, and you might not need any beyond what's already here--but if you do, feel free to create plug-ins, or just use the good old-fashioned command line, always available to code-savvy LIVE users.

LIVE is not a(nother) "business intelligence" or "big data analytics" platform, even though it does offer data integration and interactive graphics, including dashboards.   Wonderful products, like Google's Looker Studio, Domo, Microsoft PowerBI, and Tableau all offer much of the functionality LIVE seeks to provide--but essentially only for tabular data and geographic maps. Amazingly powerful data integration platforms like Palantir Foundry can assemble vast data resources in seconds, but those resources cannot be analyzed or visualized within a flexible, format-agnostic, open-source suite of tools. 

In the future, the LIVE team would love to connect our system to several of these commercial tools, as they become more useful ways for scientists to interact with cloud-based resources. 

All of the component parts of LIVE already exist, and funding is being sought to build out the full inter-connected system for building LIVE Environments envisioned on this website. 

In particular, a funding request is being made to NSF TIP for a research-enabling software infrastructure build-out to support three fields: Astronomy, Biology, and GIS, each with their own demonstration projects, funded separately.