Toward the role of interaction in Visual Analytics

This paper firstly provides a general introduction in the most important aspects and ideas of Visual Analytics. This multidisciplinary field focuses on the analytical reasoning of typically large and complex (often heterogeneous) data sets and combines techniques from interactive visualizations with computational analysis methods. Hereby, intuitive and efficient user interactions are a fundamental component which has to be efficiently supported by any Visual Analytics system. This integration of interaction techniques into both visual representations and automatic analysis methods supports the human-information discourse and can be realized in various ways which is discussed in the second part of the paper. We give examples of possible applications of Visual Analytics from the domain of biological simulations and highlight the importance and role of the human in the analysis loop.