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Abstract

Advanced technology has resulted in the generation of about one million terabytes of information every year. Ninety-reine percent of this is available in digital format (Keim, 2001). More information will be generated in the next three years than was created during all of previous human history (Keim, 2001). Collecting information is no longer a problem, but extracting value from information collections has become progressively more difficult. Various search engines have been developed to make it easier to locate information of interest, but these work well only for a person who has a specific goal and who understands what and how information is stored. This usually is not the Gase. Visualization was commonly thought of in terms of representing human mental processes (MacEachren, 1991; Miller, 1984). The concept is now associated with the amplification of these mental processes (Card, Mackinlay, & Shneiderman, 1999). Human eyes can process visual cues rapidly, whereas advanced information analysis techniques transform the computer into a powerful means of managing digitized information. Visualization offers a link between these two potent systems, the human eye and the computer (Gershon, Eick, & Card, 1998), helping to identify patterns and to extract insights from large amounts of information. The identification of patterns is important because it may lead to a scientific discovery, an interpretation of clues to solve a crime, the prediction of catastrophic weather, a successful financial investment, or a better understanding of human behavior in a computermediated environment. Visualization technology shows considerable promise for increasing the value of large-scale collections of information, as evidenced by several commercial applications of TreeMap (e.g., http://www.smartmoney.com) and Hyperbolic tree (e.g., http://www.inxight.com) to visualize large-scale hierarchical structures. Although the proliferation of visualization technologies dates from the 1990s where sophisticated hardware and software made increasingly faster generation of graphical objects possible, the role of visual aids in facilitating the construction of mental images has a long history. Visualization has been used to communicate ideas, to monitor trends implicit in data, and to explore large volumes of data for hypothesis generation. Imagine traveling to a strange place without a map, having to memorize physical and chemical properties of an element without Mendeleyev's periodic table, trying to understand the stock market without statistical diagrams, or browsing a collection of documents without interactive visual aids. A collection of information can lose its value simply because of the effort required for exhaustive exploration. Such frustrations can be overcome by visualization.
Visualization can be classified as scientific visualization, software visualization, or information visualization. Although the data differ, the underlying techniques have much in common. They use the same elements (visual cues) and follow the same rules of combining visual cues to deliver patterns. They all involve understanding human perception (Encarnacao, Foley, Bryson, & Feiner, 1994) and require domain knowledge (Tufte, 1990). Because most decisions are based an unstructured information, such as text documents, Web pages, or e-mail messages, this chapter focuses an the visualization of unstructured textual documents. The chapter reviews information visualization techniques developed over the last decade and examines how they have been applied in different domains. The first section provides the background by describing visualization history and giving overviews of scientific, software, and information visualization as well as the perceptual aspects of visualization. The next section assesses important visualization techniques that convert abstract information into visual objects and facilitate navigation through displays an a computer screen. It also explores information analysis algorithms that can be applied to identify or extract salient visualizable structures from collections of information. Information visualization systems that integrate different types of technologies to address problems in different domains are then surveyed; and we move an to a survey and critique of visualization system evaluation studies. The chapter concludes with a summary and identification of future research directions.

Source

Annual review of information science and technology. 39(2005), S.139-177