Plotting and Graph Terminology
Explaining basic concepts such as axis, data source and data series used for plots.
What does series, data source, axis mean when dealing with plots? If you are going to create a graph or work with some plotting framework in Matlab, Python, Julia or perhaps a software packages such as Excel or Apple’s Numbers, it is useful to know what the different parts of a plot are.
I’ll try to explain it as a pipeline, starting with the data going all the way to the graphics on the screen.
Data Source
The source data we want to visualize is referred to as the data source. Typically this is organized in a table. In scientific programming packages such as R, Matlab, NumPy and Julia these is usually referred to as a Data Frame. A data frame is a table where each column has a label we can refer to it.
A data frame is different from a matrix, in that a matrix is essentially a table with homogenous data. So e.g. every row and column contains floating point numbers. In a data frame every column can have different data from the next.
I will use terminology from Julia, which should be quite similar to other software packages. In a Julia DataFrame each column is a DataArray
