Structured Visualization Design Knowledge for Grounding Generative Reasoning and Situated Feedback
P\'eter Ferenc Gyarmati, Dominik Moritz, Torsten M\"oller, Laura Koesten

TL;DR
This paper introduces a structured knowledge cataloging scheme for visualization design, enabling contextual, expert-authored guidelines that improve grounding and reasoning in generative visualization systems.
Contribution
It proposes a natural-language based cataloging scheme with metadata for visualization guidelines, capturing context, exceptions, and sources, enhancing generative reasoning and expert authoring.
Findings
Cataloged 744 guidelines from diverse sources.
Embedded guidelines in vector space for structural analysis.
Demonstrated the scheme's expressiveness and conflict detection.
Abstract
Automated visualization design navigates a tension between symbolic systems and generative models. Constraint solvers enforce structural and perceptual validity, but the rules they require are difficult to author and too rigid to capture situated design knowledge. Large language models require no formal rules and can reason about contextual nuance, but they prioritize popular conventions over empirically grounded best practices. We address this tension by proposing a cataloging scheme that structures visualization design knowledge as natural-language guidelines with semantically typed metadata. This allows experts to author knowledge that machines can query. An expert study () indicates that practitioners routinely adapt heuristics to situational factors such as audience and communicative intent. To capture this reasoning, guideline sections specify not only advice but also the…
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.
Taxonomy
TopicsData Visualization and Analytics · Design Education and Practice · Digital Humanities and Scholarship
