Information Visualization and Visual Data Mining

Data visualization is the graphical display of abstract information for two purposes: sense-making (also called data analysis) and communication. Important stories live in our data and data visualization is a powerful means to discover and understand these stories, and then to present them to others. In this paper, we propose a classification of information visualization and visual data mining techniques which is based on the data type to be visualized, the visualization technique and the interaction and distortion technique. We exemplify the classification using a few examples, most of them referring to techniques and systems presented in this special issue.