Capturing and Using Knowledge about the Use of Visualization Toolkits

When constructing visualization pipelines using toolkits, developers must understand what sequencing of operators will transform their data from its raw state to some requested visual representation. In some cases, the requested visual representation must be generated from hybrid pipelines, composed of both toolkit-based and custom operators. Traditionally, developers learn about how to construct these visualization pipelines by word of mouth, by reading documentation and by inspecting code examples, all of which can be costly in terms of time and effort expended. The Visualization Knowledge Project (VisKo) is built on a knowledge base of visualization toolkit operators including rules for how operators are chained together to form pipelines. VisKo helps scientists by automatically generating and suggesting fully functional visualization pipelines, alleviating scientists from having to write any pipeline code. This paper reports on the kinds of knowledge required to support automatic pipeline generation as well our successes when applying VisKo to a number of visualizations scenarios spanning geophysics, environmental and materials science.