###### Abstract  
Data are crucial to improve decision-making and obtain greater benefits in any type of activity. However, the large amount of information generated by new technologies has made data analysis and knowledge generation a complex task. Numerous tools have emerged to facilitate this generation of knowledge, such as dashboards. Although dashboards are useful tools, their effectiveness can be affected by poor design or by not taking into account the context in which they are placed. Therefore, it is necessary to design and create custom dashboards according to the audience and data domain. This paper presents an application of the software product line paradigm and the integration of this approach into a web service to allow users to request source code for customized information dashboards. The main goal is to introduce the idea of creating a holistic ecosystem of different services to craft and integrate information visualizations in a variety of contexts. One of the contexts that can be especially favored by this approach is the educational context, where learning analytics, data analysis of student performance, and didactic tools are becoming very relevant. Three different use cases of this approach are presented to illustrate the benefits of the developed generative service. information dashboards; metamodeling; visualization goals; visualization tasks; data visualization; dashboard ecosystem; code generation +
Footnote †: journal: Medical  
through information flows, although they can be seen as independent components or tools [2; 3]. The \"ecosystem\" metaphor transfers properties from the biological to the technology field, so the relationships among the organisms can be seen as information flows between the technological ecosystem's components. On the other hand, the physical environment can be seen as the mechanisms or methods to support these flows [2]. For these reasons, applying an ecosystem approach to this matter benefits users by providing access to a whole generative pipeline for information dashboards, with components that interact and collaborate among them to offer powerful features, but also to independent services for more specific tasks. In fact, this ecosystem would support knowledge management, because all the tacit knowledge associated with dashboard design processes, design decisions, data transformations, etc., would be managed by the different components. Besides, the proposed ecosystem's features rely on a dashboard meta-model that accounts for other factors that determine the dashboard design process: the users' characteristics, the data domain, the potential data context, etc. Several data domains could benefit from these kinds of services--specifically, data domains in which the variety of data sources and the heterogeneity of data is determinant. The educational context is one of these domains. Educational dashboards [4] are instruments that allow their users to identify patterns, relationships, relevant data, etc., among a set of learning variables [5]. However, in a context such as education, many roles can be involved: from the students themselves to teachers, heads of studies, or principals; and these roles will have different objectives when exploring their data, depending on their needs. This diversity of roles was analyzed in a literature review conducted by [6] regarding educational dashboards. While the majority of users are usually teachers, students, administrators and researchers are also among the primary users of these tools. Educational dashboards are also diverse in terms of their objectives; self-monitoring, monitoring of other students, and administrative monitoring [6]. The abovementioned literature review also shows the main types of charts or visualizations used to display learning information according to the user's role. Thus, the most commonly used graphics in general by all roles are bar charts, line charts, and tables.