VisAnatomy: An SVG Chart Corpus with Fine-Grained Semantic Labels

TL;DR

VisAnatomy is a comprehensive SVG chart corpus with detailed semantic labels, enabling advanced visualization research and AI applications through fine-grained annotations of over 383,000 graphical elements.

Contribution

The paper introduces VISANATOMY, a large-scale SVG chart corpus with multi-level semantic labels, surpassing existing datasets in detail and diversity for visualization research.

Findings

Demonstrated the corpus's utility in four visualization tasks.

Compared VISANATOMY's richness with existing corpora.

Showcased applications in semantic inference and chart classification.

Abstract

Chart corpora, which comprise data visualizations and their semantic labels, are crucial for advancing visualization research. However, the labels in most existing corpora are high-level (e.g., chart types), hindering their utility for broader applications in the era of AI. In this paper, we contribute VISANATOMY, a corpus containing 942 real-world SVG charts produced by over 50 tools, encompassing 40 chart types and featuring structural and stylistic design variations. Each chart is augmented with multi-level fine-grained labels on its semantic components, including each graphical element's type, role, and position, hierarchical groupings of elements, group layouts, and visual encodings. In total, VISANATOMY provides labels for more than 383k graphical elements. We demonstrate the richness of the semantic labels by comparing VISANATOMY with existing corpora. We illustrate its usefulness through four applications: semantic role inference for SVG elements, chart semantic decomposition, chart type classification, and content navigation for accessibility. Finally, we discuss research opportunities to further improve VISANATOMY.