In this paper, we presented an approach to furnish computer generated illustrations with automatically generated figure captions. These figure captions describe the depicted content, the view on an underlying model and the thematic aspects on which the visualization focuses. Several abstraction techniques for graphical emphasis of focused objects are used interactively by the Zoom Illustrator and described within figure captions. The interactive exploration of anatomic models is supported by dynamic and adaptable figure captions.
Although inspired mainly by anatomic illustrations, the concepts presented here are broadly applicable to describe visualizations of structured data, as for example maps [18] and technical documentation [10].
Although there is a high variation in the linguistic realization of the figure captions content, the basic structure is fairly fixed and some typical phrases dominate. Hence, the overall structure of figure captions can be represented in a structure potential of figure captions while different templates within a template category can be used to flexibly describe the content of the structural elements within the macrostructure.