Guest Editor's Introduction: Special issue on Selected InfoVis 2002 Papers

Information Visualization (2003) 2, 1–2. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ivs.9500030 It is an honor to welcome you to the first theme issue of Information Visualization dedicated entirely to the papers selected from IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis) 2002. The annual InfoVis symposium, which has been sponsored by IEEE Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics (TCVG) since 1995, is the leading technical forum to showcase the research and applications in information visualization. This year’s 27% paper acceptance rate indicates that the InfoVis 2002 program represents the highest quality and most up-to-date work contributed by researchers and practitioners of the community. The intent of this special issue is to bring this exciting work to our broad journal readership as an overview for future research and a foundation for further development. Seven InfoVis papers were selected and their authors invited to revise and extend the papers into full-blown journal papers. These papers, which cover a wide range of topics and areas, represent the state-of-the-art and future trends in information visualization. The authors of these papers were asked to add more background information for a multidisciplinary audience, present detailed descriptions of how their systems are constructed and/or evaluated, include new examples and results, and explain the implications and impacts of their work to a wider readership. These papers then went through a vigorous review process by a panel of experts before they were recommended for acceptance. In the end, the revised papers show substantial improvement and exceed the high-quality standard set by the journal. The visualization and navigation of hierarchy or tree structures continue to be a hot research topic of this community. The two prevailing approaches in hierarchy visualization, namely connection and enclosure, are extended by Nguyen and Huang to form a 2-D space-optimized tree technique and take advantages of both worlds. The paper presents multiple implementations and a customized focus+context technique to navigate the new tree structure. Another prevailing hierarchy visualization design is the radical layout approach. Yang et al. present a new 2-D radical, space-filling technique which, among other ingenious options, supports multifocus distortions and interactive hierarchy configuration. A user-study discussion is included to evaluate the performance of the new design. It is widely believed that a 3-D visualization technique may improve the effectiveness and efficiency of hierarchy visualization – if one can solve the occlusion problem. Van Ham and van Wijk propose a 2and 3-D tree visualization known as Beamtrees to depict a large hierarchy. Nodes in a Beamtree are shown as stacked pipes so that the occlusion problem is minimized. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate the performance and the results are included in the paper. There are many practical applications of hierarchy visualization in the real world. Brandes and Corman discuss a 3-D visualization technique, Information Visualization (2003) 2, 1–2 & 2003 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 1473-8716 $25.00