The novelty is not the scroll-to-zoom interaction - it's the creation of a declarative grammar for several visualization types (see Figure 2 for examples), and a system that implements this in a way that is scalable to datasets containing billions of observations.

The contributions claimed in the paper are [1]:

> To summarize, we make the following contributions:

> •An integrated system called Kyrix-S for declarative authoring and rendering of SSVs at scale.

> •A concise and expressive declarative grammar for describing SSVs (Section 4).

> •A framework for offline database indexing and online serving that enables interactive browsing of large SSVs (Sections 5 and 6).

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.15904.pdf

Very cool. This could give Plot.ly a run for its money in the data science community.

Also regarding Figure 2, and at the risk of sounding cliché: my inner graphic designer is weeping at the use of Comic Sans as their choice of code font.

First author here.

In addition to a declarative grammar, a big thing is the ability to scale past browser memory limits.

The system works with a distributed Postgres (Citus) to perform parallel hierarchical clustering to get the aggregation computed, and uses Postgres spatial indexes to fetch data on demand. We can scale to billions of records (see reddit comment demo in the news article).

Also we are not limited to common representations such as circles. In fact you can create your own in D3.

Here's a live demo of 1.88 million historical wildfires: http://wildfire2.kyrixdemo.live/