VAST Knowledge Graph Visualization

Collaborative project developed by students of the Course on Visual Analytics in response to the VAST Challenge 2025 – Design Challenge.

Challenge page: https://vast-challenge.github.io/2025/DC.html

Overview

This repository is intended to host the research, design material, prototypes, and documentation produced for the 2025 VAST Design Challenge. The challenge asks participants to conceive a visual analytics design for knowledge graphs that helps non-expert users:

• discover new information or relationships,
• identify anomalies or inconsistencies, and/or
• infer missing information from context.

Knowledge graphs combine graph structure with rich, heterogeneous node and edge attributes. This creates important visualization challenges related to scale, uncertainty, incomplete information, and interpretability. Our project explores how visual analytics can support these tasks through an accessible and well-justified design.

Project Goals

The main goals of this collaborative project are to:

1. study the VAST 2025 Design Challenge requirements;
2. investigate visual encodings and interaction techniques for knowledge-graph exploration; (see Notes of meeting 1)
3. design a visual analytics solution that supports the challenge tasks;
4. document the design rationale, limitations, and intended user workflow;
5. coordinate the contributions of the student team.

Challenge Context

According to the challenge brief, the final submission should focus on a design, not necessarily a fully working prototype. However, within the class we will explore factual implementations using Vue.js and D3.js to have a final tool that can be used to demonstrate the design.

Any suitable knowledge-graph-like dataset may be used to motivate or illustrate the design. The emphasis is on visual analytics thinking and design interactivity capable of supporting multiple domain scenarios.

Repository Status

At the moment, this repository is in an initial setup stage and primarily serves as a starting point for team collaboration. It will also serve as a central location to track the meetings and design decisions made during classes.

Working Approach

A possible workflow for the team is:

1. Interpret the challenge

   • identify the analytical tasks the team wants to support;
   • define the target user and usage scenario.

2. Explore design alternatives

   • compare different visual representations for large, attributed, uncertain graphs;
   • evaluate trade-offs between overview, detail, explainability, and interaction complexity.

3. Develop and refine the concept

   • create sketches, wireframes, or interactive mockups;
   • gather feedback during class reviews or team meetings;
   • refine the design rationale and task support.

4. Prepare final deliverables

   • write the final design description;
   • document limitations and assumptions;
   • assemble supporting visuals, storyboard, and reflection material.

Collaboration Guidelines

To keep the project organized, contributors may follow these practices:

• create focused branches for substantial changes;
• use clear commit messages;
• document design decisions in markdown files under docs/;
• store figures and interface mockups in assets/.

Team

This project is developed collaboratively by students of the Course on Visual Analytics.

This section will be later expanded with the list of participants.

References

• VAST Challenge 2025 – Design Challenge: https://vast-challenge.github.io/2025/DC.html
• IEEE VIS / VAST community resources on visual analytics, graph visualization, and knowledge graphs