Foundations and Frontiers in Visual Analytics

This article is a product of a workshop on the Future of Visual Analytics, held in Washington, DC on 4 March, 2009. Workshop attendees included representatives from the visual analytics research community across government, industry and academia. The goal of the workshop, and the resulting papers, was to reflect on the first 5 years of the visual analytics enterprise and propose research challenges for the next 5 years. The article incorporates input from workshop attendees as well as from its authors. Introduction This introduction and the future vision section for this special issue of Information Visualization hopes to set the stage for an emerging worldwide effort to advance the state of the science of visual analytics. We present some of the driving needs followed by some principles and methods for advancing this science through partnerships among national laboratories , academia, industry and the international science community. Also presented is a selection of the many successes the science, engineering and industrial communities have had in taking core scientific research to end users in the field during these early years. These stories are followed by some thoughts on frontiers and the future vision for visual analytics. Finally, we introduce the eight papers in this special issue, each one addressing part of that vision.