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Pages from many sites can find each other when they arrive together in a browser and at that moment connect data to computations and computations to visualizations. Here we explain how that happens.
A federated wiki page is a tree of data annotated with the names of plugins that can make sense of branches.
The core wiki javascript finds these annotations, loads the corresponding plugin code, and then turns over subsequent processing to them.
A plugin that has data to offer will advertise this by adding an appropriate announcement to its region of the dom in the form of a distinguished class name.
Here is a Method Plugin that can compute values and expose results suitable for plotting on a radar chart.
The plugin renders this as a table and includes the announcement that it a "radar-source".
Now lets find a page that can make use of this data by including within it a plugin for a radar chart. The chart comes with about-pages that includes variously configured visualizations. We'll use the variation that discovers the axes from the data itself.
Click on the flag below to load this page from another site.
When the Radar Plugin loads it looks to its left for a "radar-source". The Method Plugin above will do. A connection is made. Data flows to the right.
The two plugins cooperate in more ways. Hover over the attributes in the Method Plugin above. The Radar Plugin reorients itself with that axis horizontal.
The Radar Plugin makes these axis labels into links to further documentation that may be found anywhere in the neighborhood.
A radar chart is good for comparing things on many dimensions. See How We Find More Data to see how a Radar Plugin handles multiple things.
The Radar Plugin has code that will try several different signaling strategies for communicating with other plugins. This codes up into ten source lines. github