Evaluating Visual Analytics at the 2007 VAST Symposium Contest

In this article, we report on the contest´s data set and tasks, the judging criteria, the winning tools, and the overall lessons learned in the competition. We believe that by organizing these contests, we´re creating useful resources for researchers and are beginning to understand how to better evaluate VA tools. Competitions encourage the community to work on difficult problems, improve their tools, and develop baselines for others to build or improve upon. We continue to evolve a collection of data sets, scenarios, and evaluation methodologies that reflect the richness of the many VA tasks and applications.