Tulip aims to provide the developer with a complete library, supporting the design of interactive information visualization applications for relational data that can be tailored to the problems being addressed.

It is developed at LaBRI, the laboratory for research in computer science of the University of Bordeaux.

Written in C++, the framework enables the development of algorithms, visual encodings, interaction techniques, data models, and domain-specific visualizations.

Tulip allows the reuse of components; this makes the framework efficient for research prototyping as well as the development of end-user applications.

Tulip can work with very huge data sets, e.g. 1,000,000 nodes and 5,000,000 edges.