The Value of Information Visualization - Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives - page 11

Fig. 5. Dynamic HomeFinder showing the Washington D.C. area with homes available
for sale and controls to filter them according to several criterion.

3.2 Testimonials

One effective line of argumentation about the value of InfoVis is through re-
porting the success of projects that used InfoVis techniques. These stories exist
but have not been advertised in general scientific publications until recently
[20,16,13]. One problem with trying to report on the success of a project is that
visualization is rarely the only method used to reach the success. For example,
in biological research, the insights gainedbyanInfoVissystemcanleadtoan
important discovery that is dicult to attribute mainly to the visualization since
it also required months of experimentation to verify the theory formulated from
the insights. In fact, most good human-computer interaction systems allow users
to forget about the system and focus on their task only, which is probably one
reason why success stories are not so common in the InfoVis literature.
Besides these stories that are empirical evidence of the utility of information
visualization, there are strong theoretical arguments to how and why information
visualization works.

4 Information Visualization vs. Automatic Analysis

Several scientific domains are concerned by understanding complex data. Statis-
tics is the oldest, but Data Mining — a subfield of Artificial Intelligence — is
also concerned with automatically understanding the structure of data. There-
fore, InfoVis practitioners frequently need to explain what InfoVis can do that
statistics and data mining cannot.