Top ten visualization problems

ions The final pair of problems involve abstractions of the visualization process. O Define effective abstractions for the visualization and user interaction process. Examples include the relational and field data models for information being visualized, the data flow model of the visualization process, mathematical models of human visual perception, mathematical models of interaction, models of users and their tasks and more general models of computing and distributed computing. Some of these models incorporate objectoriented programming ideas. Building a system around an abstract model gives it generality, but it also leads to inefficiency and difficult user interfaces. Building a system in response to immediate needs and without an abstraction makes it difficult to adapt to new uses. Effective abstractions have generality where it is needed but also make limiting assumptions that permit efficient and usable implementations. In addit ion to its practical consequences, this is the foundations problem for visualization. Q Present abstractions to users in ways that reconcile expressiveness and ease-of-use. Some users want to visualize simple information with minimal effort, while others want to customize and experiment with the entire visualization and interaction process in order to understand complex informat ion. Advanced users want clear presentations of complex choices, whereas basic users want the system to supply reasonable defaults so they can ignore those choices. Even advanced users want to focus on certain choices wi thout needing to learn about all possible choices. Systems succeed or fail largely on how well they solve this problem. Plea for Uniform Network Environment Finally, building the shared virtual world will be difficult enough without doing it on top of the current "Tower of Babel" of incompatible systems on the Internet. We need a uniform network computing environment and Java is currently the only technically and politically credible candidate. Sun has done a wonderful service by creating Java and deserves to profit. However, Sun needs to share control of the standard and Microsoft needs to lose its fear of platform independence, open standards and open source. We as users and developers have the power to demand an open and uniform network computing environment. 22 Computer Graphics