In this paper we discuss the issues of visualisation in architectural design and civil engineering in the broader sense. Usually the term "visualisation" in these fields is connected with 3D modeling and photorealism of physical objects. Another part of the research community understands visualisation as the visual representation of numerical data, popular in the field of data mining and scientific visualisation. In this paper, we present a common approach for designing visualisation schemes

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... t leverage pre-arranged semantics. The approach is based on a combination of the models of the metaphor in cognitive linguistics and the form-semantics-function categorisation. The use and development of metaphors is still handcrafted rather than based on formal methods. Our framework includes evaluation of the metaphor mapping.