VA-Blueprint: Uncovering Building Blocks for Visual Analytics System Design

TL;DR

VA-Blueprint offers a systematic methodology and knowledge base for designing urban visual analytics systems, leveraging automation and expert validation to improve development efficiency and reproducibility.

Contribution

It introduces a structured blueprint and a scalable approach using large language models to identify core components of VA systems from literature.

Findings

Successfully identified and organized core components of urban VA systems.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of automation in scaling knowledge base construction.

Validated the approach through expert interviews and quantitative analysis.

Abstract

Designing and building visual analytics (VA) systems is a complex, iterative process that requires the seamless integration of data processing, analytics capabilities, and visualization techniques. While prior research has extensively examined the social and collaborative aspects of VA system authoring, the practical challenges of developing these systems remain underexplored. As a result, despite the growing number of VA systems, there are only a few structured knowledge bases to guide their design and development. To tackle this gap, we propose VA-Blueprint, a methodology and knowledge base that systematically reviews and categorizes the fundamental building blocks of urban VA systems, a domain particularly rich and representative due to its intricate data and unique problem sets. Applying this methodology to an initial set of 20 systems, we identify and organize their core components into a multi-level structure, forming an initial knowledge base with a structured blueprint for VA system development. To scale this effort, we leverage a large language model to automate the extraction of these components for other 81 papers (completing a corpus of 101 papers), assessing its effectiveness in scaling knowledge base construction. We evaluate our method through interviews with experts and a quantitative analysis of annotation metrics. Our contributions provide a deeper understanding of VA systems' composition and establish a practical foundation to support more structured, reproducible, and efficient system development. VA-Blueprint is available at https://urbantk.org/va-blueprint.