The semantics of a relational database may be modeled using an entity-relationship (ER) diagram that represents entities and the relations between the entities. Systems and methods are provided for automatically composing meaningful thumbnails/composited images or visuals from ER diagrams and their associated databases by using the semantics of the underlying data model. First, the most meaningful relations in which a given data element participates are extracted. Second, composited images are composed depicting these relations using a domain-specific visual language and rendering techniques based on the relative weighting of the relations.