ABSTRACT
IN the previous chapters of this book, we have concentrated our attentionon the visualization of datasets that essentially contain the sampling of continuous quantities over compact domains of Rn. We have seen that such datasets occur in many fields, ranging from engineering and computational fluid mechanics and mathematics to medical and Earth sciences. The field that studies the visualization of these data types and targets the aforementioned application domains is known as scientific visualization (scivis). In this chapter, we shall discuss the visualization of a different, more abstract type of data. Examples of such data range from generic graphs and trees to database tables, text, and computer software. The nature of such data, as well as that of the application fields where it is used, generate additional, but also different, requirements and constraints to the visualization process.
