The RDFS/OWL Visualisation Language (RVL) is using concepts from the VISO/graphic ontology. The language allows for describing mappings from RDFS/OWL concepts to graphic attributes such as (viso-graphic:color_hsl_lightness) or other graphic relations (e.g. viso-graphic:Containment_Relation). Look at the post on RVL by Jan Polowinski.
VISO: A Shared, Formal Knowledge Base as a Foundation for Semi-automatic InfoVis Systems
New publication on the VISO ontology:
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VISO: A Shared, Formal Knowledge Base as a Foundation for Semi-automatic InfoVis Systems
Polowinski, Jan, und Martin Voigt. In CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI WIP ’13. Paris, France: ACM, 2013.
PDF POSTER
© ACM, 2013. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1791–1796. CHI EA ’13. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2013. doi:10.1145/2468356.2468677.
Find the VISO Docu now directly at purl.org/VISO/
The VISO documentation can now be accessed directly from the ontology’s URL, e.g.
You may also call resource-URIs like
Thanks to content negotiation, your ontology tools such as TopBraid Composer will still be able to receive the ontology’s data sources from the same adress. This does also work for some browsers such as Chrome (Select “Download file as …” from the context menu). Unfortunately Firefox seems to have some problems with our current set up. We will try to fix this. So far you can simply point your ontology editor to the the VISO URL, or watch the source by clicking on “Ontology source” in the documentation.
Directly pointing the browser to VISO concepts
You can now* point the Browser directly to concepts in the VISO:
http://purl.org/viso/graphic/Containment_Relation
*Thanks to improvements in LODE, the tool for live documenting ontologies, we use. Thank you to Silvio Peroni for this!
Technical Report on VISO
You can find documentation on the process of creating VISO and possible use cases in a technical report that we published: Towards a Unifying Visualization Ontology . [BibTeX]
VISO Modules

The following modules are online:
Alpha Version of the Visualisation Ontology (VISO)
Please note: Links may be out of date here. The new document can be found here.
An alpha version of the Visualisation Ontology (VISO) can be browsed on the web. You may have to load VISO by selecting it from the drop-down menu and clicking “load”.
If you want to look at the annotated VISO already in its current state, you find here our working document. (Please note that all references in square brackets point to this internal reference list we used. They will soon be converted into a BIBO bibliography).
Discussion on VISO is open
We call for participation in discussing, improving and extending the Visualisation Ontology (VISO) at http://viso.qhub.com/ . Everybody is welcome to criticize our initial approach.