Technical and Scientific Issues

The emphasis of research investigations is placed on real systems: i.e., physically realizable structures and processes. Consequently, the visualization process embraces both real (acquired) and synthetic (modeled) information systems. These considerations lead to a number of important and challenging issues and problems:

• How can multidimensional information fields be effectively visualized?
• How can specific information be properly extracted from these multidimensional data sets?
• What are appropriate mechanisms for organizing, representing, and analyzing the extracted information?
• What mathematical and computational techniques can be used to create realistic models of the underlying geometric structures or dynamic processes?
• How can these models be manipulated interactively?
• Can visual reasoning mechanisms be formulated computationally to facilitate the interpretation of this information?
• How can complex visualization models, or interpretations of these models, be communicated easily and unambiguously to someone else?
• What constitutes a good (or better) interactive visualization?