Section: Application Domains

Introduction

“Collaborating with Application Domains. To achieve greater penetration of visualization into application domains we must better integrate visualization capabilities with the requirements and environments of these domains. To achieve this integration, we must allow application goals, domain knowledge, and domain-specific conventions and metaphors to shape visualization methods. Visualization methods must address the characteristics of real, rather than ideal, data, addressing among others the challenges of heterogeneity, change over time, error and uncertainty, very large scale, and data provenance.” [19]

Visualization is by nature fed by application domains. Questions are raised by and embodied in domain specific datasets. Working close to our end users is mandatory the users we are concerned with are experts from specific scientific domains or industrial sectors. Following an iterative process, the analysis/hypotheses evolve and refine while the visualization becomes more focused and adapted to the user's task. Put differently, the visualization helps expert users refine their hypotheses on the data while at the same time they become able to express their needs for visualization more effectively.