ABSTRACT
The goal of information visualization (IV) is to amplify human cognition through computer-generated, interactive, and visual data representation. By combining the computational power with human perceptional and associative capabilities, IV will make it easier for users to navigate through large amounts of information, discover patterns or hidden structures of the information, and understand semantics of the information space. This entry reviews the history and background of IV and discusses its basic principles with pointers to relevant resources. The entry also summarizes major IV techniques and toolkits and shows various examples of IV applications.
