An Environment for Creating Interactive Statistical Documents
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Authors
Buttrey, Samuel E.
Nolan, Deborah
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Date of Issue
2001
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Abstract
The spectacular growth and acceptance of theWeb has made it a very attractive medium for interactive documents.
Web-based reporting in industry, “live” documents in research, and interactive worksheets in education material are
in many ways ideal uses of the Web. These types of documents frequently display dynamic, statistical output both
in the form of text and plots. Unfortunately, much of the effort in creating these types of documents has focussed
on re-inventing existing statistical software, and often with inferior results. The reason is that systems such as S and
SAS cannot be integrated into the reader’s browser.
A better approach is to allow the author to create a document using the common authoring tools (e.g. LATEX, MS
Word or HTML editors) and to conveniently insert dynamic and interactive components from other languages. The
author focuses on the presentation and display of these components, including the usual multi-media elements such
as text, images and sounds. She uses HTML form elements and Java components to provide interactive controls with
which the reader can manipulate the contents of the document. And finally she performs statistical computations and
renders visual displays using the statistical software that is embedded within the reader’s browser.
In this presentation, we describe how we have created an environment for interactive statistical documents. It
allows the author to use HTML, JavaScript and R to create the content and the interactivity. The reader accesses
the interactive and dynamic functionality of the document via a plug-in for Netscape that embeds R within it. The
different languages are all reasonably standard tools and each is used for the purposes for which it was designed.
This makes it a reasonably straightforward environment in which to quickly and simply create interfaces for various
different applications and audiences.
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Article
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Operations Research
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.