• Bekanntgabe der Pressemitteilung in der Saarbrücker Zeitung am 30.05.2007
• "Wie riesige Datenmengen sichtbar und verständlich werden "
  Press release 23.05.07(German only)

Information Visualization (InfoVis) focuses on the use of visualization techniques to help people understand and analyze data. While related fields such as Scientific Visualization involve the presentation of data that has some physical or geometric correspondence, Information Visualization centers on abstract information without such correspondences.

One important aim of this seminar was to bring together theoreticians and practitioners from Information Visualization and related fields as well as from application areas. The seminar has allowed a critical reflection on actual research efforts, the state of field, evaluation challenges, etc. This document summarizes the event.

Information Visualization (InfoVis) is a relatively new research area that focuses on the use of visualization techniques to help people understand and analyze data. While related fields such as Scientific Visualization involve the presentation of data that has some physical or geometric correspondence, Information Visualization centers on abstract information without such correspondences, i.e., there is no possibility to map this information into the physical world in most cases. Examples of such abstract data are symbolic, tabular, networked, hierarchical, or textual information sources. The ever increasing amount of data generated or made available every day confirms the urgent need of InfoVis tools. There are many possible visual representations but only a fraction are helpful for a given task or application domain. As prerequisite for building a successful visualization, InfoVis combines several aspects of different research areas, such as Scientific Visualization, Human-Computer Interaction, Data Mining, Information Design, Cognitive Psychology, Visual Perception, Cartography, Graph Drawing, and Computer Graphics. Also, aesthetic aspects play a more and more important role: the FirstWorkshop on Computational Aesthetics 2005 in Girona, Spain, and the resulting Dagstuhl Seminar 06221 emphasize such aspects not only in the InfoVis area.

One main goal of this seminar was to bring together theoreticians and practitioners from the addressed research areas as well as from application areas, such as Bioinformatics, Finance, Geo Sciences, Software Engineering, Telecommunication, etc. There are several international conferences that include information visualization topics. Each of them have a slightly different high-level objective. In this context, a consolidation within one seminar appeared to be very beneficial.

Seminar Topics

• Human-Centered Aspects
• Human-Computer Interfaces
• Visualization Techniques and Models
• InfoVis Aesthetics
• User Interaction
• Multimodal Visualization
• Usability
• Scalability
• Quality Measures
• Perception and Cognition (Psychology Backgrounds)
• Prior Knowledge of the Users
• Education and Training
• Large or Mobile Displays
• Novel Visual Representations
• Visual Analytics
• Domain Specific Visualizations
• Evaluations and Empirical Studies

The seminar has allowed a critical reflection on actual research efforts, the state of field, evaluation challenges, etc. Participants also were encouraged to perform system demonstrations of prototypes and environments relevant to the seminar topics.

The organizers and participants decided to publish a book that should document and extend the findings and discussions of this Dagstuhl Seminar. Beforehand, the organizers gained the agreement of Springer Press to publish an LNCS State-of-the-Art issue on the seminar theme. The book will cover the problems discussed in the various sessions in detail. An extended seminar report also is planned to be sent to the Information Visualization Journal (IVS) published by Palgrave.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all participants of the seminar for the lively discussions during the seminar as well as the scientific directorate of Dagstuhl Castle for giving us the possibility of organizing this event. Carsten Görg gathered the abstracts for the abstract collection and the talks of all presenters. These talks can be found on the materials site of the seminar. In addition, many attendees agreed to take notes during the seminar sessions. These notes were the basis for writing this executive summary and are also available for download on the Dagstuhl web page of the seminar. Last but not least, the seminar would not have been possible without the great help of the staff of Dagstuhl Castle. We would like to acknowledge all of them and their assistance.