- Introduction

This chapter provides a high-level introduction to data and information vi-

sualization, what visualizations are, and why imagery is so important. It

presents reasons for using visualization, shows how visualizations are ap-

plied to problem solving, and discusses the process of visualization. The

visualization pipeline is presented with its relationship to other data anal-

ysis pipelines. Finally, the importance of human perception in connection

with visualization is introduced. We assume that the reader already has a

basic understanding of computer graphics.