Creator of Polychart here. We're group of graduating students in University of Waterloo, committed to make visualization and interacting with data easy.
We're trying to tackle this idea from the practical user perspective and theoretical perspective. There are a lot of things to learn from existing systems such as R, Matlab, Maple, Tableau, and Excel. We're also trying to incorporate a lot of ideas from the data visualization community.
We're still very young, I would gladly accept comments and feedbacks from HN community.