[Sigia-l] Information Visualization

[Karl Fast]

> I want to believe it :-) but then how come we haven't seen much
> that's fundamentally different/more innovative than Apple's HotSauce
> or the SGI stuff of more than a decade ago?

There are many examples, but thus far they have been relegated to
one of three settings: (1) the research lab, (2) niche market
vertical applications, like Spotfire, instead of mass-market apps,
and (3) applications that rely on numerical data instead of those
more information/knowledge centric (which is where IA problems are
typically found).

As someone involved in this area I am often critical of it's
progress and skeptical of it's claims. But I'm enough of a believer
that I'm doing my doctoral research in this area.

Your "where's the beef" criticism of visualization is valid. I've
raised it myself. However, one could have raised the same criticisms
of hypertext for the first twenty plus years of it's existence.
Until Mosaic came along hypertext was limited to niche application
areas like help files.

Will something similar happen to visualization? Will it find the
magic ingredients necessary to break out and become a mass market
application?

The easy answer is to say "No," or to say "I'll wait for the proof."

Obviously I think it will go the other way. I don't necessarily
think it will become the dominant interaction paradigm the way
hypertext has, but I do believe we are still in the early stages.

One thing is for sure: information visualization is a lot harder
than well thought a decade ago, and remains much harder than most
people realize. 


--karl