DIVA: Data, Interaction, Visualization, and Analysis

An ontology and a thesaurus for representing and analyzing analytical provenance information from visualization tools.

Overview

DIVA provides and ontology and a thesaurus to:

• Model user interactions with visualization tools
• Capture exploration paths and patterns
• Enable semantic analysis of visual analytics process
• Support reuse and comparison of analysis strategies

The DIVA namespace is http://ns.inria.fr/diva/

RDF Data Modeling

See the ontology repository.

Case Study: eSTIMe visualization system

To demonstrate the usage of DIVA, we lifted system logs describing analytical provenance information from the eSTIMe visualization system, a multi-screen visualization platform designed for exploring urban mobility data.

The system logs describe the exploration processes of six users, varying from 31 to 207 steps (i.e., performed actions within the visualization). Each log was recorded as a JSON array, structured sequentially to represent user interactions and the corresponding visualization states. Each log entry includes metadata such as timestamp, action type, target, view context, and descriptors of the resulting artifacts (e.g., visualizations or datasets). We used the rdflib library in Python to transform this structured JSON data into an RDF KG.

A set of competency questions were implemented through SPARQL queries and interactive visualization tools, supporting visual exploration of analytical provenance information.

See the Case Study repository.

Publications

Aline Menin, Catherine Faron. DIVA: An Ontology-based Approach to Model User Activity within Visualization Systems. SAC 2026 - 41st ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, Mar 2026, Thessaloniki, Greece. (10.1145/3748522.3779893) (hal-05403198v1)

@inproceedings{menin2026diva,
  TITLE = {{DIVA: An Ontology-based Approach to Model User Activity within Visualization Systems}},
  AUTHOR = {Menin, Aline and Faron, Catherine},
  BOOKTITLE = {{SAC 2026 - 41st ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing}},
  ADDRESS = {Thessaloniki, Greece},
  YEAR = {2026},
  MONTH = Mar,
  DOI = {10.1145/3748522.3779893}
}

Directory Structure

diva/
├── ontology/              # DIVA files
│   ├── diva.ttl          # OWL ontology in Turtle format
│   └── thesaurus.ttl     # SKOS vocabulary in Turtle format
│
└── case-study/           # Example implementation
│   ├── data/             # Input and output data used in the case study                                    
│   ├── lifting/          # Data conversion scripts
│   ├── sparql-examples/  # Example SPARQL queries and competency questions
│   └── vis/              # Visualization components
└── website/
    ├── images/           # Logos and illustrative images
    ├── ontology/         # Ontology webpage components, generated from diva.ttl
    └── thesaurus/        # Thesaurus webpage components, geenrated from thesaurus.ttl

License

See the LICENSE file.