[Initiative] Visualization framework unification

[joshuarrrr]

As part of the new proposed design strategy, we want to:

1. Provide OSD users with a clean, unified visualization experience that looks polished and consistent
2. Provide OSD developers with unified interfaces to easily develop, enhance, extend, and interact with visualizations

This initiative focuses on goal 2 - we believe that the right tools and technical architecture will serve as a force multiplier, by making it easy for a wider community of developers to collectively achieve goal 1.

For more details on this approach, see:

• [Proposal] Consolidate chart-rendering to Vega-Lite #2385
• [RFC] What type of visualization abstractions do developers need? #2507

Projects and work streams

This initiative will evolve over time, but we've already identified several separate areas of need that we can start working on in parallel. Each of these items is expected to move along a path of Discussion/RFC -> Proposal -> Design -> Implementation.

1. [Research] Inventory existing visualization abstractions and APIs #2584
2. [Research] UX audit of OUI visualization guidelines and current visualization patterns #3368
3. [Epic] [Visualizations] Consolidate visualization-rendering to Vega-Lite #2819
4. [Discuss] Separate out data source configurations from existing visualization types #2823
5. [Discuss] Define standard visualization capabilities as contracts #2824
6. [Proposal] Improve and expand charts plugin to become the "Visualization Style Integrator" #2830
7. [Proposal] Create vis_options plugin for creating modular visualization editing interfaces #2832
8. [Proposal] Improve and expand visualization type definitions for easier plugin use #2833
9. [Feature Anywhere] Enable plugins to augment visualizations with additional data and context #2880

To keep organized all issues related to this initiative will be labeled as unified visualization UX