Prefuse was developed by University of California Berkeley's Visualization Lab to facilitate the visual representation of data through spatial position, size, shape, color and other visual features. The software package is available for free and works under the terms of a BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) license. So far Prefuse got a wide use in the academic and industrial research, software development as well as school projects. 

Prefuse is operated in an integrated development environment Eclipse using Java programming language with some features of 2D computer graphics. The set of functions for interaction with data is quite rich. The data structures that Prefuse supports are tables, graphs and trees. The visualization nature of Prefuse is very dynamic and includes numerous possible operations with data including support for queries to SQL databases. But the zest of Prefuse is in its interactive filtering of data, view transformation and animation. In the user interface of final visualization one can choose the proper view of its data based on such parameters as connectivity filter with a possibility to set distance among nodes and edges, a degree of force simulation for dynamic layout and animation of the data. Prefuse seems to be a very convenient tool in case one wants to play with different visual forms of the data, for instance the tree structure of the data can be divided into balanced tree or diamond tree.

Although Prefuse user interface seems to be pretty easy the successful work with the program requires substantial knowledge of Eclipse, otherwise it can be hard to get the best performance results out of the program. The software seems to be a really good one in terms of visual abstraction. But as the program does the biggest part of your work it doesn’t seem to provide a big room for the visual fantasy of the user. The animation is really strong, sometimes to the point of annoyance when you need to struggle with non stop moving spots on the screen of your visualization. Such visual components as layout parameters, color, size, distortion and animation add value to Prefuse as a good program for data visualization. Another feature such as text search support for prefix, keyword, and regular expression helps for better orientation within the text.   

Prefuse was used in this research abstract available in XML format https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lehkost/ToolXtractor/master/data/xml/2015/SIMPSON_John_Edward_Building_Better_Linked_Data___Ontol.xml