Various data visualization applications such as reverse engineering and interactive authoring require a vocabulary that describes the structure of visualization scenes and the procedure to manipulate them. A few scene abstractions have been proposed, but they are restricted to specific applications for a limited set of visualization types. A unified and expressive model of data visualization scenes for different applications has been missing. To fill this gap, we present Manipulable Semantic Components (MSC), a computational representation of data visualization scenes, to support applications in scene understanding and augmentation. MSC consists of two parts: a unified object model describing the structure of a visualization scene in terms of semantic components, and a set of operations to generate and modify the scene components. We demonstrate the benefits of MSC in three applications: visualization authoring, visualization deconstruction and reuse, and animation specification.

翻译：诸如逆向工程和交互式创作等各类数据可视化应用，都需要一种能够描述可视化场景结构及其操作流程的词汇体系。已有若干场景抽象模型被提出，但它们局限于特定应用场景且仅支持有限的可视化类型。目前尚缺乏一个适用于不同应用的、统一且富有表现力的数据可视化场景模型。为填补这一空白，我们提出了可操纵语义组件（MSC），一种数据可视化场景的计算表示方法，以支持场景理解与增强类应用。MSC包含两部分：一个通过语义组件描述可视化场景结构的统一对象模型，以及一组用于生成和修改场景组件的操作。我们通过三个应用场景展示了MSC的优势：可视化创作、可视化解构与复用，以及动画规范。