ABSTRACT
Visual analytics involves the combination of automated data analysis techniques with interactive visualisation. The role of the ‘analytics’ part of this process relates to the automatic processing of the data in order to spot trends and patterns in the mass of data and to provide recommendations on which course of action might be most appropriate. The role of the human, then, becomes potentially a consumer of the output of the complex analytics processes. This raises the question of how best to design visualisation for human decision making in complex, dynamic domains. This is, of course, a perennial challenge for ergonomics and much of this work has echoes of interface design for complex, dynamic systems, such as control rooms. Data are collected from a variety of sources some of which can be imprecise or with variation in the quantity of data to be analysed.
