In the 1920s, American mete-orologists began to use symbols and pictograms to represent such natural phenomena as hail, lighting, snow, and thunderstorms in their weather charts.Įver since Leonardo da Vinci created perspective drawing in the 1400s, the technique has been used as the primary method for creating technical The earliest map to use a latitude/longitude grid was drawn in China in 1137 to depict the travels of Da Yu (Yu the Great). describe the relationship between Egyptian astronomy and mythology. For example, the astronomical images painted in the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I in 1290 B.C.E. Astronomy, cartography, and meteorology were some of the earliest fields to use visualization techniques. Visual representation of information has been helpful in assisting humans with the description, classification, analysis, and comprehension of the natural world. In modern Chinese, for example, there are more than fifty thousand ideographs. The term 'ideograph' refers to a symbol that is used to represent a concept in a pictographic language. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are pictures that were used as a form of visual communication. However, the use of graphs, pictures, and drawings was not restricted to the recording and depicting of objects visualization also became an effective means for representing abstract concepts and communicating abstract ideas. For example, the Paleolithic cave paintings found in the Remigia Cave at La Gasulla in Spain vividly illustrate a group of hunters killing a wild boar. As far back as 20,000 B.C.E., humans began to draw, paint, or carve images on cave walls to record and depict aspects of their experiences. The use of images to represent objects from the real world has a long history. Visualization has been studied by a variety of scholars and researchers from such disciplines as art history, cognitive science, computer graphics, epistemology, graphic design, image processing, linguistics, semiotics, technical communication, and visual interfaces. Visualization through computers can be portrayed as pictures and graphs, two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, three-dimensional models and simulations, animations, video segments, and so on. Edward Tufte (1990) categorizes visualization into three types: pictures of numbers (e.g., statistic graphs), pictures of nouns (e.g., maps and aerial photographs), and pictures of verbs (e.g., representations of motion, process, cause and effect). There are many ways to approach the concept of visualization. With effective visual interfaces we can interact with large volumes of data rapidly and effectively to discover hidden characteristics, patterns, and trends' (Gershon, Eick, and Card, 1998, p. Visualization is the process of transforming data, information, and knowledge into visual form making use of human's natural visual capabilities. A more recent and domain-specific definition of visualization is given by the following: 'Visualization provides an interface between two powerful information processing systems-human mind and the modern computer. Generally speaking, the purpose of visualization is to provide the user with not only a visual presentation and interpretation of the data and information but also a better understanding of the phenomenon behind the data and information. Visualization is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as 'the action or fact of visualizing, the power or process of forming a mental picture or vision of something not actually present to the sight.' As the old adage 'a picture is worth a thousand words' goes, visualization can be defined as a method that makes the best use of a person's perceptual abilities to observe, access, and understand data and information.

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