Investigating visualization ontologies

The advent of the Grid Computing paradigm and the link to Web Services provides fresh challenges and opportunities for collaborative visualization. Ontologies are a central building block of the Semantic Web. Ontologies define domain concepts and the relationships between them, and thus provide a domain language that is meaningful to both humans and machines. In this paper, the analysis and design of a prototype ontology for visualization are discussed, whose purpose is to provide the semantics for the discovery of visualization services, support collaborative work, curation, and underpinning visualization research and education. Relevant taxonomies are also reviewed and a formal framework is developed