VISO: a shared, formal knowledge base as a foundation for semi-automatic infovis systems

Interactive visual analytic systems can help to solve the problem of identifying relevant information in the growing amount of data. For guiding the user through visualization tasks, these semi-automatic systems need to store and use knowledge of this interdisciplinary domain. Unfortunately, visualisation knowledge stored in one system cannot easily be reused in another due to a lack of shared formal models. In order to approach this problem, we introduce a visualization ontology (VISO) that formally models visualization-specific concepts and facts. Furthermore, we give first examples of the ontology's use within two systems and highlight how the community can get involved in extending and improving it.