Information Visualization

DOI: 10.1057/palgrave/ivs/9500009 Welcome to Information Visualization! I am delighted to be able to introduce to you the first issue of the peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the research and practice of information visualization. The new journal will cover a variety of aspects of information visualization, ranging from fundamental research to practical applications. Information Visualization aims to provide a forum that can accommodate not only the unique focus of information visualization, but also the diverse interests of researchers and practitioners from an increasing number of disciplines. What is information visualization? Why do we need to devote a whole new journal to this topic? For many of us, information visualization can be broadly defined as a computer-aided process that aims to reveal insights into an abstract phenomenon by transforming abstract data into visualspatial forms. The intention of information visualization is to optimize the use of our perceptual and visual-thinking ability in dealing with phenomena that might not readily lend themselves to visual-spatial representations. Information visualization is truly an interdisciplinary field of study. It has maintained strong ties with a number of research fields, notably scientific visualization, information retrieval, and geographic information systems. The beginning of scientific visualization was marked by a National Science Foundation (NSF) panel report in 1987 on graphics, image processing and workstations, in which the key to visualization is defined as the ‘transformation of the symbolic into the geometric’. For information visualization, the question is whether such geometry is intrinsically derivable from the data or one has to impose it on top of the data. Information visualization traditionally focuses on finding meaningful and intuitive ways to represent non-spatial and non-numerical information to people. Information visualization as a field of study has grown tremendously over the last few years. Since the first IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization in 1995 at Atlanta, Georgia, the annual symposium has become the flagship arena for the information visualization community. Since 1997, another IEEE sponsored international conference on Information Visualization has been held annually in London. Information visualization publications also appear in conferences such as ACM Conferences on Human Factors and Computing Systems (CHI) and User Interface Science and Technology (UIST). The number of review and survey articles on information visualization is steadily increasing. Since 1999, there has been a boom of books on information visualization. A related book is on algorithms for graph visualization. Today, there are numerous workshops held all over the world in relation to information visualization. Figure 1 shows a rapid increase of the number of journal articles published each year. The statistics are based on bibliographic records in the Web of Science, ISI’s integrated citation database. The interdisciplinary nature of information visualization is reflected in the number of fields that have strong ties with this relatively young field. Information Visualization (2002) 1, 1 – 4 a 2002 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 1473 – 8716 $15.00