Manipulable Semantic Components: a Computational Representation of Data Visualization Scenes

TL;DR

This paper introduces Manipulable Semantic Components (MSC), a unified computational model for representing and manipulating data visualization scenes across various applications, enhancing scene understanding and editing capabilities.

Contribution

The paper presents MSC, a novel, unified model that describes and manipulates visualization scenes using semantic components, addressing limitations of previous scene abstractions.

Findings

MSC enables scene understanding and augmentation.

MSC supports visualization authoring, deconstruction, and animation.

MSC improves flexibility and expressiveness in visualization scene manipulation.

Abstract

Various data visualization applications such as reverse engineering and interactive authoring require a vocabulary that describes the structure of visualization scenes and the procedure to manipulate them. A few scene abstractions have been proposed, but they are restricted to specific applications for a limited set of visualization types. A unified and expressive model of data visualization scenes for different applications has been missing. To fill this gap, we present Manipulable Semantic Components (MSC), a computational representation of data visualization scenes, to support applications in scene understanding and augmentation. MSC consists of two parts: a unified object model describing the structure of a visualization scene in terms of semantic components, and a set of operations to generate and modify the scene components. We demonstrate the benefits of MSC in three applications: visualization authoring, visualization deconstruction and reuse, and animation specification.