Information visualization: data infrastructure architectures

Information visualization extends the scope of scientific visualization from physical phenomena to informational entities. This broadening is a direct reflection of the needs expressed by industry, national security, health and other national agendas to include all forms of information within the information analysis processes. It includes: masses of text, forms, and documents; business, manufacturing, and scientific databases; videos; audio; imagery; and most importantly the interactions with all these media types used to enable an enhanced process of discovery understanding, and presentation of situation assessments. In order for information visualization to become a reality, a rich, flexible data infrastructure must be established. The paper defines the scope of information visualization, the emerging opportunities and uses, the related and supporting technologies, and presents a data infrastructure architecture. This architecture supports full distributed multimedia information spaces, including technologies such as information agents, metadata transformations, and local derived metadata management which turns data and information into knowledge