AnnoGram: An Annotative Grammar of Graphics Extension

AnnoGram

📅 August 8, 2025✍️ Md Dilshadur Rahman, Md. Rahat-Uz-Zaman, Andrew M McNutt, Paul Rosen📚 IEEE VIS 2025, pp. 236–240🎯 article

DOI

arXiv

@inproceedings{rahat2025vlannotation,
  author    = {Md Dilshadur Rahman and Md Rahat-uz-Zaman and Andrew McNutt and Paul Rosen},
  title     = {{AnnoGram}: An Annotative Grammar of Graphics Extension},
  booktitle = {2025 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS)},
  pages     = {236--240},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {{IEEE}},
  doi       = {10.1109/VIS60296.2025.00053},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.1109/VIS60296.2025.00053}
}

Annotations are central to effective data communication, yet most visualization tools treat them as secondary constructs — manually defined, difficult to reuse, and loosely coupled to the underlying visualization grammar. We propose a declarative extension to Wilkinson’s Grammar of Graphics that reifies annotations as first-class design elements, enabling structured specification of annotation targets, types, and positioning strategies. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, we develop a prototype extension called Vega-Lite Annotation. Through comparison with eight existing tools, we show that our approach enhances expressiveness, reduces authoring effort, and enables portable, semantically integrated annotation workflows.