This is the first book that focuses entirely on the fundamental questions in visualization. Unlike other existing books in the field, it contains discussions that go far beyond individual visual representations and individual visualization algorithms. It offers a collection of investigative discourses that probe these questions from different perspectives, including concepts that help frame these questions and their potential answers, mathematical methods that underpin the scientific reasoning of these questions, empirical methods that facilitate the validation and falsification of potential answers, and case studies that stimulate hypotheses about potential answers while providing practical evidence for such hypotheses. Readers are not instructed to follow a specific theory, but their attention is brought to a broad range of schools of thoughts and different ways of investigating fundamental questions. As such, the book represents the by now most significant collective effort for gathering a large collection of discourses on the foundation of data visualization. Data visualization is a relatively young scientific discipline. Over the last three decades, a large collection of computer-supported visualization techniques have been developed, and the merits and benefits of using these techniques have been evidenced by numerous applications in practice. These technical advancements have given rise to the scientific curiosity about some fundamental questions such as why and how visualization works, when it is useful or effective and when it is not, what are the primary factors affecting its usefulness and effectiveness, and so on. This book signifies timely and exciting opportunities to answer such fundamental questions by building on the wealth of knowledge and experience accumulated in developing and deploying visualization technology in practice.

This book presents 13 peer-reviewed papers as written results from the 2005 workshop "Topology-Based Methods in Visualization" that was initiated to enable additional stimulation in this field. It contains a survey of the state-of-the-art, as well original work by leading experts that has not been published before, spanning both theory and applications. It captures key concepts and novel ideas and serves as an overview of current trends in its subject.

This is the first book that focuses entirely on the fundamental questions in visualization. Unlike other existing books in the field, it contains discussions that go far beyond individual visual representations and individual visualization algorithms. It offers a collection of investigative discourses that probe these questions from different perspectives, including concepts that help frame these questions and their potential answers, mathematical methods that underpin the scientific reasoning of these questions, empirical methods that facilitate the validation and falsification of potential answers, and case studies that stimulate hypotheses about potential answers while providing practical evidence for such hypotheses. Readers are not instructed to follow a specific theory, but their attention is brought to a broad range of schools of thoughts and different ways of investigating fundamental questions. As such, the book represents the by now most significant collective effort for gathering a large collection of discourses on the foundation of data visualization. Data visualization is a relatively young scientific discipline. Over the last three decades, a large collection of computer-supported visualization techniques have been developed, and the merits and benefits of using these techniques have been evidenced by numerous applications in practice. These technical advancements have given rise to the scientific curiosity about some fundamental questions such as why and how visualization works, when it is useful or effective and when it is not, what are the primary factors affecting its usefulness and effectiveness, and so on. This book signifies timely and exciting opportunities to answer such fundamental questions by building on the wealth of knowledge and experience accumulated in developing and deploying visualization technology in practice.

When scientists analyze datasets in a search for underlying phenomena, patterns or causal factors, their first step is often an automatic or semi-automatic search for structures in the data. Of these feature-extraction methods, topological ones stand out due to their solid mathematical foundation. Topologically defined structures-as found in scalar, vector and tensor fields-have proven their merit in a wide range of scientific domains, and scientists have found them to be revealing in subjects such as physics, engineering, and medicine. Full of state-of-the-art research and contemporary hot topics in the subject, this volume is a selection of peer-reviewed papers originally presented at the fourth Workshop on Topology-Based Methods in Data Analysis and Visualization, TopoInVis 2011, held in Zurich, Switzerland. The workshop brought together many of the leading lights in the field for a mixture of formal presentations and discussion. One topic currently generating a great deal of interest, and explored in several chapters here, is the search for topological structures in time-dependent flows, and their relationship with Lagrangian coherent structures. Contributors also focus on discrete topologies of scalar and vector fields, and on persistence-based simplification, among other issues of note. The new research results included in this volume relate to all three key areas in data analysis-theory, algorithms and applications.

When scientists analyze datasets in a search for underlying phenomena, patterns or causal factors, their first step is often an automatic or semi-automatic search for structures in the data. Of these feature-extraction methods, topological ones stand out due to their solid mathematical foundation. Topologically defined structures-as found in scalar, vector and tensor fields-have proven their merit in a wide range of scientific domains, and scientists have found them to be revealing in subjects such as physics, engineering, and medicine. Full of state-of-the-art research and contemporary hot topics in the subject, this volume is a selection of peer-reviewed papers originally presented at the fourth Workshop on Topology-Based Methods in Data Analysis and Visualization, TopoInVis 2011, held in Zurich, Switzerland. The workshop brought together many of the leading lights in the field for a mixture of formal presentations and discussion. One topic currently generating a great deal of interest, and explored in several chapters here, is the search for topological structures in time-dependent flows, and their relationship with Lagrangian coherent structures. Contributors also focus on discrete topologies of scalar and vector fields, and on persistence-based simplification, among other issues of note. The new research results included in this volume relate to all three key areas in data analysis-theory, algorithms and applications.