A Characterization of the Computational Power of Rule-based Visualization

Declarative visualization is a paradigm in which the process of visualization is treated as a mapping from some domain (typically a program) to an image. One means of declaring such mappings is through the use of rules which specify the relationship between the domain and the image. This paper examines the computational power of such rule-based mappings, focusing on their ability to construct the types of images typically desired in program visualization applications.