VA-Blueprint

Uncovering Building Blocks for Visual Analytics System Design

LLM-generated knowledge base for visual analytics system components

IEEE VIS 2025

From visual analytics papers to a hierarchical blueprint of system components — VA-Blueprint turns visual analytics papers into a hierarchical JSON blueprint of each system: its components at several levels of abstraction and their dependencies.

VA-Blueprint presents a methodology and the resulting knowledge base for uncovering and structuring the fundamental building blocks of Visual Analytics (VA) systems. We systematically extracted and organized components, operations, and their dependencies from a corpus of existing VA system research papers. The core of the approach involves a multi-level hierarchical structure (High Blocks, Intermediate Blocks, Granular Blocks) formalized into a blueprint (represented as JSON) that details system composition and data/interaction flows. This knowledge base, encompassing 101 systems, was constructed via initial manual analysis followed by Large Language Model (LLM) automation for scalable extraction. The goal is to provide a structured, queryable repository that reveals common design patterns and architectures, thereby offering a practical foundation to support more structured, reproducible, and efficient VA system development, comparison, and understanding.

Publications

VA-Blueprint: Uncovering Building Blocks for Visual Analytics System Design

Leonardo Ferreira, Gustavo Moreira, Fabio Miranda

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE VIS 2025), 2026

Paper arXiv Code

Team

Leonardo FerreiraUniversity of Illinois Chicago
Gustavo MoreiraUniversity of Illinois Chicago
Fabio MirandaUniversity of Illinois Chicago

How to cite

BibTeX

@article{ferreira2026vablueprint,
  title = {VA-Blueprint: Uncovering Building Blocks for Visual Analytics System Design},
  volume = {32},
  doi = {10.1109/tvcg.2025.3634809},
  number = {1},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
  publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)},
  author = {Ferreira, Leonardo and Moreira, Gustavo and Miranda, Fabio},
  year = {2026},
  month = jan,
  pages = {1197--1207},
  eprint = {2508.07497},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv}
}