Visual analytics science and technology

It is an honor to welcome you to the first theme issue of Information Visualization (IVS) dedicated entirely to the study of visual analytics. It all started from the establishment of the U. under the leadership of NVAC, a team of the world's best and brightest multidisciplinary scholars coauthored its first research and development agenda, Illuminating the Path, which defines the study as 'the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.' Among the most exciting, challenging, and educational events developed since then was the first IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) held in Baltimore, MD in October 2006. This theme issue features seven outstanding articles selected from the IEEE VAST proceedings and a commentary article contributed by Jim Thomas, the director of NVAC, on the status and progress of the Center. The seven selected IEEE VAST papers, which cover a wide range of topics, represent the state-of-the-art and future trends in visual analytics science and technology. The paper authors 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 significant changes and exceed the high-quality standard set by the journal. 'Interactive wormhole detection and evaluation' by Weichao Wang and Aidong Lu presents an interactive visualization technique to detect worm-hole attacks in a wireless network. A user study on the visualization technique is included to show the effectiveness of the design. A second network-related paper of this theme issue is 'NetLens: iterative exploration of content–actor network data' The paper presents NetLens – an interactive tool to analyze graph data by visualizing multiple simple coordinated views of ordered lists and histogram overviews of the underlying graphs. 'ScentIndex and ScentHighlights: productive reading techniques for conceptually reorganizing subject indexes and highlighting passages' describes a visual analytics technique to interactively navigate a digitized book, organize its entries, and skim its contents. The study shows that humans can grasp the contents of a paper book more effectively when using the interactive system. Paul E. Keel introduces a visual analytics environment for the support of collaborative sensemaking activities in 'EWall: a visual analytics environment for …