Introduction to the Special Section

In this special issue of Information Visualization, we present three of the best papers from the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis). The annual symposium, held in conjunction with the week-long IEEE Visualization conference, is sponsored by the IEEE Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics. This year we selected 27 papers from 89 submissions, for a 30% acceptance rate. We appreciate the help of the Best Paper Committee of Pat Hanrahan (chair), Jock Mackinlay, and Lucy Nowell in selecting these three papers for publication in this journal. Two of these papers discuss exploration techniques: one for multidimensional data and another for geospatial data. The third paper presents a formal evaluation of two different graph drawing methods. ‘A Rank-by-Feature Framework for Interactive Exploration of Multidimensional Data’ by Jinwook Seo and Ben Shneiderman presents a method of organizing and exploring low-dimensional projections of multidimensional data. Users select some criteria, for example, normality or skewedness, and the views are ranked by the magnitude of that feature. This technique is implemented in the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer, and shown on both US Census data and microarray data. ‘On the Readability of Graphs Using Node-Link and Matrix-Based Representations: A Controlled Experiment and Statistical Analysis’ by Mohammad Ghoniem, Jean-Daniel Fekete, and Philippe Castagliola evaluates two different ways to draw graphs. Although the traditional node-link view performs well for the path-finding task, the authors find that for six other tasks an adjacency matrix view is more effective for large graphs. ‘GeoTime Information Visualization’ by Thomas Kapler and William Wright presents a method of combining temporal and geospatial event data in a visualization aimed at tracking events, objects, and activities. In GeoTime, their 3D system, a ground plane showing geographic location, is linked with vertical representations of time. Information Visualization (2005) 4, 95 & 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 1473-8716 $30.00