An Environment for Creating InteractiveStatistical Documents

摘要

The spectacular growth and acceptance of theWeb has made it a very attractivernmedium for interactive documents. Web-based reporting in industry, “live” documentsrnin research, and interactive worksheets in education material are in manyrnways ideal uses of theWeb. These types of documents frequently display dynamic,rnstatistical output both in the form of text and plots. Unfortunately, much of the effortrnin creating these types of documents has focussed on re-inventing existingrnstatistical software, and often with inferior results. The reason is that systems suchrnas S and SAS cannot be integrated into the reader’s browser.rnA better approach is to allow the author to create a document using the commonrnauthoring tools (e.g. LATEX, MSWord or HTML editors) and to conveniently insertrndynamic and interactive components from other languages. The author focuses onrnthe presentation and display of these components, including the usual multi-mediarnelements such as text, images and sounds. She uses HTML form elements and Javarncomponents to provide interactive controls with which the reader can manipulaternthe contents of the document. And finally she performs statistical computationsrnand renders visual displays using the statistical software that is embedded withinrnthe reader’s browser.rnIn this presentation, we describe how we have created an environment for interactivernstatistical documents. It allows the author to use HTML, JavaScript andrnR to create the content and the interactivity. The reader accesses the interactivernand dynamic functionality of the document via a plug-in for Netscape that embedsrnR within it. The different languages are all reasonably standard tools and eachrnis used for the purposes for which it was designed. This makes it a reasonablyrnstraightforward environment in which to quickly and simply create interfaces forrnvarious different applications and audiences.