A Linguistic Formalism for Specifying Visual Representations

Date
2005-04-29
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
With the proliferation of access to digital media it is becoming increasingly common for people to present information visually. This has led to a myriad of new types of visual representations that frequently come into existence without an associated formalism. It is often difficult to retroactively fit a given formalism to an existing visual representation. We present a formalism that provides us with tools capable of describing visual representations. Using an analogy to natural languages, we build an alphabet composed of two types of ordered letters. With these letters we can develop several languages whose grammar is described by their morphology and syntax. Each language thus defined is capable of describing a family of visual representations. We illustrate this capability by specifying the morphology and syntax necessary to describe two different visual representations of multidimensional data, parallel coordinates and glyphs.
Description
Keywords
Computer Science
Citation