Illuminating the path: The research and development agenda for visual analytics

Book Thomas, J. J. & Cook, K. A. (2005). Illuminating the path: The research and development agenda for visual analytics (No. PNNL-SA-45230). Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (US). Main focus on Visual Analytics in its role in defence in light of terrorism and security concnerns. Visual Analytics is multidisciplinary field that includes: Analytical Reasoning Techniques Convergent and divergent thinking Volume and scale of data Analytical discourse Visual Representations and Interaction Techniques Create a science of visual representations based on cognitive and perceptual principles that can be deployed through engineered, reusable, components. Principles must address all types of data, address scale and information competitive,  enable knowledge discovery through information synthesis and facilitate analytical reasoning Develop a new science of interactions that supports the analytical reasoning process. This interaction science must provide a taxonamy of interaction techniques ranging from low-level interactions to more compelx interactions techniques and must address the challenge to scale across different types of display environments and tasks. Data Representation and transformation Develop both theory and practice for transforming data into new scalable representations that faithfully represent the content of the underlying data. Create methods to synthesize information of different types and from different sources into a unified data representation so that analysts, first responders, and border personnel may focus on the meaning of the data. Develop methods and principles for representing data quality, reliability, and certainty measures throughout the data transformation and analysis process. Techniques to support production, presentation and dissemination