Data Visualization: Featuring Interactive Visual Analysis

Data visualization is an application‐driven field, that is always trying to satisfy its customers and to adapt to the demands, cultures, and workflows of many application areas. Therefore, it is difficult to keep focus on techniques and approaches that are not too application specific. A lot of good work on data visualization consists of single‐problem solutions, that cannot be easily merged into general‐purpose systems. In this talk, I will briefly review some current trends and issues, and identify some approaches that are common to many applications. One such approach in data visualization that has attracted interest from the early days is the detection of salient features, or patterns of interest in a data set. The main idea is to extract information at a higher level of abstraction from a mass of data, that is richer in semantics but much smaller in size, and that can help to define scenes and objects for visualization. This idea was pioneered in areas such as flow visualization, but is now more widely applied. It is often considered to be necessity to keep up with the ever rapidly increasing size of data sets, and the demand for interactivity in data visualization and analysis. Another generic approach in data visualization is called interactive visual analysis (TVA), consisting of a strongly interactive multiple‐linked‐view interfaces with integrated, powerful data analysis techniques taken from statistical analysis, pattern recognition, machine learning, and other fields. This is built on the assumptions that a single 2D or 3D visualization is often not enough, and spatial views can be augmented with abstract, derived data spaces; that strong interaction helps to promote insight; and that a better balance is needed between human visual inspection and computer‐based analysis and reasoning. Interestingly, an IVA interface can serve not only as an environment for exploration of low‐level data, but also for defining the high‐level features to be extracted, that should summarize the essence of the data. The high‐level features are usually highly application specific, and can only be found using theories from the application domains. The big challenge is to create environments for general purpose visual data analysis, and yet allow users to introduce advanced theories and methods from many application domains. The trend towards more integration in data visualization will be illustrated with cross‐links between very different areas, such as medical and flow visualization, and the combined use of techniques from scientific visualization and information visualization, and the absorption of other data analysis techniques. Also, historic and contemporary examples of feature extraction and interactive visual analysis will be shown.