AnnoGram: An Annotative Grammar of Graphics Extension
Md Dilshadur Rahman, Md Rahat-uz- Zaman, Andrew McNutt, Paul Rosen

TL;DR
This paper introduces AnnoGram, a declarative extension to the Grammar of Graphics that treats annotations as first-class elements, improving expressiveness and reusability in data visualization.
Contribution
It presents a novel annotation extension to Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics, enabling structured, reusable, and portable annotations within visualization workflows.
Findings
Enhanced expressiveness in visualization annotations
Reduced authoring effort compared to existing tools
Enabled portable and semantically integrated annotation workflows
Abstract
Annotations are central to effective data communication, yet most visualization tools treat them as secondary constructs -- manually defined, difficult to reuse, and loosely coupled to the underlying visualization grammar. We propose a declarative extension to Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics that reifies annotations as first-class design elements, enabling structured specification of annotation targets, types, and positioning strategies. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, we develop a prototype extension called Vega-Lite Annotation. Through comparison with eight existing tools, we show that our approach enhances expressiveness, reduces authoring effort, and enables portable, semantically integrated annotation workflows.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
