Biomedical professionals use data graphics widely in research, teaching, and patient care.
There are families of specialized data graphics, which I term domain graphics, that incorporate domain-specific layout and drawing conventions to display the unique characteristics of data from a particular field of study. Examples of biomedical domain graphics include pedigree trees, clinical flowcharts, and secondary-structure diagrams. Although domain graphics are used widely in the biomedical literature, they rarely appear in user interfaces to biomedical information systems. The principal challenges to building such user interfaces lie in identifying and implementing programmatically the design knowledge needed to generate domain graphics automatically. I propose a method of modeling families of domain-specific data graphics that facilitates the use of such domain graphics as visual metaphors in biomedical user interfaces.