{20 () Discovery through Interaction *

The explosive growth in the availability of information is overwhelming traditional information management systems. Although individual pieces of information have become easy to nd, the larger context in which they exist has become harder to track. These contextual questions are ideally suited to visualization since the human visual system is remarkably adept at interpreting large quantities of information, and at detecting patterns and anomalies. The challenge is to present the information in a manner that maximally leverages our visual skills. This paper discusses a set of properties that such a presentation should have, and describes the design and functionality of VxInsight, a visualization tool built to these principles.