  Visual analytics (VA) systems have been widely used in various application
domains. However, VA systems are complex in design, which imposes a serious
problem: although the academic community constantly designs and implements new
designs, the designs are difficult to query, understand, and refer to by
subsequent designers. To mark a major step forward in tackling this problem, we
index VA designs in an expressive and accessible way, transforming the designs
into a structured format. We first conducted a workshop study with VA designers
to learn user requirements for understanding and retrieving professional
designs in VA systems. Thereafter, we came up with an index structure VAID to
describe advanced and composited visualization designs with comprehensive
labels about their analytical tasks and visual designs. The usefulness of VAID
was validated through user studies. Our work opens new perspectives for
enhancing the accessibility and reusability of professional visualization
designs.
