[Sigia-l] Information Visualization

[Karl Fast]

> I, for one, would be interested to know what current/future
> technology will solve the problem of 'scrubbing' (interactively
> streaming) multi-terabyte databases for large numbers of concurrent
> info visualizers?

Is this necessary for infoviz to succeed?

I don't believe it is.

The great modern day example of scalability is search engines like
Altavista and Google. But these are the exception, not the rule.
Most search problems don't need to scale to that size. There is a
power law in effect here, and most of us are in that long tail
dealing with document sets of a million, often much less.

Similarly, not all visualization applications involve interactively
streaming multi-terabyte databases for large numbers of concurrent
users. Visualization is not restricted to problems at the outer
edges of our technological limits.

Scalability is one issue, but it's not the only one.

Criticizing visualization because of the scalability issue seems a
bit like dismissing 'horseless carriages' because the Model T
couldn't go 500 miles on a tank of gas.

And as noted in my other post, progress is being made on the
scalability front.


--karl