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A scientific visualization of an extremely large simulation of a Raleigh-Taylor instability caused by two mixing fluids.

Scientific and Information visualization are branches of computer graphics and user interface design that are concerned with presenting data to users by means of images. Both fields seek ways to help users explore, make sense of, and communicate about data. They are active research areas, drawing on theory in information graphics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction and cognitive science.

Information visualization and scientific visualization have overlapping goals and techniques. There is currently no clear consensus on the boundaries between these fields, but broadly speaking the two areas can be distinguished as follows:

• Scientific visualization deals with data that has a natural geometric structure (e.g. MRI data or wind flows).
• Information visualization handles more abstract data structures, such as trees or graphs.

A related term, visual analytics, focuses on human interaction with visualization systems as part of a larger process of data analysis. Visual analytics has been defined as "the science of analytical reasoning supported by the interactive visual interface"^{[citation needed]}. Its focus is on human information discourse (interaction) within massive, dynamically changing information spaces. Visual analytics research concentrates on support for perceptual and cognitive operations that enable users to detect the expected and discover the unexpected in complex information space. Technologies resulting from visual analytics find their application in almost all fields, but are being driven by critical needs (and funding) in biology and national security.

The Ptolemy world map, reconstituted from Ptolemy's Geographia (circa 150), indicating the countries of "Serica" and "Sinae" (China) at the extreme right, beyond the island of "Taprobane" (Sri Lanka, oversized) and the "Aurea Chersonesus" (Southeast Asian peninsula).

Charles Minard's information graphic of Napoleon's march

The use of visualization to present information is not a new phenomenon. It has been used in maps, scientific drawings, and data plots for over a thousand years. Examples from cartography include Ptolemy's Geographia (2nd Century AD), a map of China (1137 AD), and Minard's map (1861) of Napoleon's invasion of Russia half a century earlier. Most of the concepts learned in devising these images carry over in a straight forward manner to computer visualization. Edward Tufte has written two critically acclaimed books that explain many of these principles.

Computer graphics has from its beginning been used to study scientific problems. However, in its early days the lack of graphics power often limited its usefulness. The recent emphasis on visualization started in 1987 with the special issue of Computer Graphics on Visualization in Scientific Computing. Since then there have been several conferences and workshops, co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and ACM SIGGRAPH, devoted to the general topic, and special areas in the field, for example volume visualization.

Most people are familiar with the digital animations produced to present meteorological data during weather reports on television, though few can distinguish between those models of reality and the satellite photos that are also shown on such programs. TV also offers scientific visualizations when it shows computer drawn and animated reconstructions of road or airplane accidents. Some of the most popular examples of scientific visualizations are computer-generated images that show real spacecraft in action, out in the void far beyond Earth, or on other planets. Dynamic forms of visualization, such as educational animation, have the potential to enhance learning about systems that change over time.

Apart from the distinction between interactive visualizations and animation, the most useful categorization is probably between abstract and model-based scientific visualizations. The abstract visualizations show completely conceptual constructs in 2D or 3D. These generated shapes are completely arbitrary. The model-based visualizations either place overlays of data on real or digitally constructed images of reality, or they make a digital construction of a real object directly from the scientific data.

Scientific visualization is usually done with specialized software, though there are a few exceptions, noted below. Some of these specialized programs have been released as Open source software, having very often its origins in universities, within an academic environment where sharing software tools and giving access to the source code is common. There are also many proprietary software packages of scientific visualization tools.

Models and frameworks for building visualizations include the data flow models popularized by systems such as AVS, IRIS Explorer, and VTK toolkit, and data state models in spreadsheet systems such as the Spreadsheet for Visualization and Spreadsheet for Images.

Some attribute the birth of Scientific Visualization to the efforts of electrical engineering professionals in the 1980s. This is a highly debated topic. Others point to such efforts as the mainframe generated Chernoff faces of the 1970s, which we owe to the noted mathematician Herman Chernoff. These multivariate expressions of data were, in their original form, not interactive or animated, but their supporters point out that animated and/or interactive versions are now available.

Desktop programs capable of presenting interactive models of molecules and microbiological entities are becoming relatively common (Molecular graphics). The field of Bioinformatics and the field of Cheminformatics make a heavy use of these visualization engines for interpreting lab data and for training purposes. Since this field has known its biggest growth spurt at about the same time as the web, it is keen on integrating metadata formats such as the XML based Chemical Markup Language, while being conscious of older formats such as SMILES.

Medical imaging is a huge application domain for scientific visualization with an emphasis on enhancing imaging results graphically, e.g. using pseudo-coloring or overlaying of plots. Real-time visualization can serve to simultaneously image analysis results within or beside an analyzed (e.g. segmented) scan.

Data visualization techniques are now commonly used to provide Business intelligence. Performance metrics and Key Performance Indicators are displayed on an interactive Digital dashboard, also known as an executive dashboard, enterprise dashboard or BI dashboard. Business executives use these software applications to monitor the status of business results and activities. For a look at typical dashboard presentations of data visualizations, see The Dashboard Spy, a collection of data visualization dashboards.

• Treemapping A visualization technique aimed at abstract trees
• Parallel coordinates A visualization technique aimed at multidimensional data
• Many Eyes Public, web-based visualizations
• Prefuse Java Toolkit for Interactive Information Visualization
• Starlight Info Vis System, R&D 100 winner
• Tulip C++/Qt framework for navigation, graph drawing, clustering and edition of huge graphs.
• The Information visualization reference model for construction of Information Visualization systems. Similar to the 'Model view controller' software engineering architectural pattern.

• Statistics, statistical package, multivariate statistics
• Forecasting, technical analysis
• Data Mining, also known as knowledge-discovery in databases (KDD)
• GeoVisualization, short for Geographic Visualization
• Graph Drawing
• Scientific modeling
• Cave Automatic Virtual Environment
• Morphological Modeling

• Amer. Soc. of Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T SIGVIS): Special Interest Group in Visualization Information and Sound
• IEEE Visualization Conference
• National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Scientific Visualization Tutorials, Georgia Tech
• Business Dashboard Examples, a screenshot collection of over 1000 business data visualization digital dashboards including this Business Dashboard of the Day.
• Scientific Visualization Studio (NASA)

• InfoVis-Wiki.net - Wiki about Information Visualization
• Information Aesthetics: Data visualization & visual communication, a continuously updated collection of infoviz applications and software
• http://vam.anest.ufl.edu - A free transparent reality simulation of an anesthesia machine that uses information visualization, including sound and color
• Information Visualization at the Open Directory Project
• VisualComplexity.com - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks
• Wikipedia itself can be visualized by a technique, called history flow.
• The structure of Wikipedia has been visualized; See e.g. ClusterBall, Pathway, WikiViz, WikiCharts, Emergent Mosaic, and Wikipedia Top 50.

• walk2web.com - a visual internet explorer
• Treemapping An implementation of a visualization technique developed by Shneiderman, Ben.

• IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Symposium

• The Digital Magazine of InfoVis.net by Juan C. Dürsteler (Spanish | English)
• VAC Views - the Visualization and Analytics Centers Periodical: research updates in the field of visual analytics.

• IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis)
• Graphics Link, including the International Conference on Information Visualization (IV)