A Bidirectional Pipeline for Semantic Interaction

Semantic interaction techniques in visual analytics tools allow analysts to indirectly adjust model parameters by directly manipulating the visual output of the models. Many existing tools that support semantic interaction do so with a number of similar features, including using a set of mathematical models that are composed within a pipeline, having a semantic interaction be interpreted by an inverse computation of one or more mathematical models, and using an underlying bidirectional structure within the pipeline. We propose a new visual analytics pipeline that captures these necessary features of semantic interactions. To demonstrate how this pipeline can be used, we represent existing visual analytics tools and their semantic interactions within this pipeline. We also explore a series of new visual analytics tools with semantic interaction to highlight how the new pipeline can represent new research as well.