Semantics-based color assignment in visualization

Abstract

The active use and manipulation of visual representations makes many complex and intensive cognitive tasks feasible. A visual representation is able to convey relationships among many elements in parallel and it provides an individual with directly observable memory. A successful visualization allows the user to gain insight into the data, that is, to communicate different aspects of the data in an effective way. Even with today's visualization systems that give the user a considerable control over the visualization process, it can be difficult to produce an effective visualization. To obtain useful results, a user has to interrogate the visualization very precisely. A strategy to improve this situation is to guide the user with the selection of the parameters involved in the visualization. This paper presents the initial effort dedicated to achieve a visualization system that assists the user in the configuration and preparation of the visualization by considering both the semantic of the data and the semantic of the stages through all the visualization process. In this article we present a visualization system for file hierarchies where color assignment is made by a reasoning process through the use of an ontology. This work sets the way forward to integrate the visualization process with a reasoning process and configure a visualization based on the reasoner s results.