Foundations for a Generic Ontology for Visualization: A Comprehensive Survey

This paper surveys existing ontologies for visualization, which formally define and organize knowledge about visualization concepts, techniques, and tools. Although visualization is a mature field, the rapid growth of data complexity makes semantically rich frameworks increasingly essential for building intelligent and automated visualization systems. Current ontologies remain fragmented, heterogeneous, and inconsistent in terminology and modeling strategies, limiting their coverage and adoption. We present a systematic analysis of representative ontologies, highlighting shared themes and, most importantly, the gaps that hinder unification. These gaps provide the foundations for developing a comprehensive, generic ontology of visualization, aimed at unifying core concepts and supporting reuse across research and practice.