Glossary » information visualization
information visualization
the study of how to effectively present information visually. Much of the work in this field focuses on creating innovative graphical displays for complicated datasets, such as census results, scientific data, and databases. An example problem would be deciding how to display the pages on a website or the files on a hard disk. Visualization techniques include selective hiding of data, layering data, taking advantage of 3-dimensional space, using scaling techniques to provide more space for more important information (e.g. fisheye views), and taking advantage of psychological principles of layout, such as proximity, alignment, and shared visual properties (e.g. color).
