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use them on a day-to-day basis. For many other users, integration within their
favourite tool is much more effective. An example of an environment that offers
such a tight integration is the ubiquitous spreadsheet, where storage, manipu-
lation, and presentation of data are offered; or the graphs and maps shown on
many web sites (and newspapers!) to show data. From an InfoVis point of view,
the presentations offered here can often be improved, and also, the interaction
provided is often limited. Nevertheless, all these examples acknowledge the value
of visualization for many applications.
The initial costs
C
i
for new InfoVis methods and techniques roughly fall into
two categories: Research and Development. Research costs can be high, because
it is often hard to improve on the state of the art, and because many experiments
(ranging from the development of prototypes to user experiments) are needed.
On the other hand, when problems are addressed with many potential usages,
these costs are still quite limited. Development costs can also be high. It takes
time and effort to produce software that is stable and useful under all conditions,
and that is tightly integrated with its context, but here also one has to take
advantage of the large potential market. Development and availability of suitable
middleware, for instance as libraries or plug-ins that can easily customized for
the problem at hand is an obvious route here.
One intriguing aspect here is how much customization is needed to solve the
problem concerned. On one hand, in many applications one of the standard data
types of InfoVis is central (table, tree, graph, text), and when the number of
items is not too high, the problem is not too hard to solve. On the other hand,
for large numbers of items one typically has to exploit all a priori knowledge of
the data set and tune the visualization accordingly; also, for applications such
as software visualizations all these data types pop up simultaneously, which also
strongly increases the complexity of the problem. So, for the time being, research
and innovation will be needed to come up with solutions for such problems as
well.
In conclusion, graphics has been adopted already on a large scale to com-
municate and present abstract data, which shows that its value has been ac-
knowledged, and we expect that due to the increase in size and complexity of
data available, the need for more powerful and effective information visualization
methods and techniques will only grow.
6Con lu on
In this paper we have described the challenges in identifying and communicat-
ing the value of InfoVis. We have cited and posed a number of answers to the
questions, “How and why is InfoVis useful?” Hopefully, the examples shown
in the paper provide convincing arguments about InfoVis' value as an analytic
tool. Ultimately, however, we believe that it is up to the community of InfoVis
researchers and practitioners to create techniques and systems that clearly il-
lustrate the value of the field. When someone has an InfoVis system that they
use in meaningful and important ways, this person likely will not need to be
convinced of the value of InfoVis.
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