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Computer visualization can handle several kinds of data though, medical examination with CT scanners, for example, supply scientific visualization with large-sized 3D data. The aim is to support the examination with a visual representation of the measured data. Such visualization techniques obviously have to be accurate, but feature highlighting may also be needed. Numerical data from real-world measurement or simulation processes are further common sources of computer visualization.
Recently, another source for visualization data is getting common, forming a new field of computer visualization. Data from business processes, finance, transaction data, data from textual analysis, etc., are the source data for so-called information visualization. In opposition to scientific visualization, the data in information visualization usually is non-spatial.
Visualization is a process of transforming information into a visual form enabling the user to observe the information. On the computer science side, it uses techniques of computer graphics and imaging. On the human side, perceptual and cognitive capabilities of the viewer determine the conditions the process needs to take into account.
Visualization is more than pretty pictures. Successful visualization can reduce the time it takes to understand the underlying data, to find relationships, and to get the information searched. To establish visualization, a mapping of the data into a Cartesian space of two or three dimensions is needed, which represents relationships contained in the data as intuitive as possible. This should enable the viewer to use his innate abilities to understand spatial relationships. Finding a good spatial representation of the data is one of the most difficult tasks in visualization of abstract information.
2D computer graphics are mainly used in applications that were originally developed upon traditional printing and drawing technologies, such as typography, cartography, technical drawing, advertising, etc.. In those applications, the two-dimensional image is not just a representation of a real-world object, but an independent artifact with added semantic value; two-dimensional models are therefore preferred, because they give more direct control of the image than 3D computer graphics (whose approach is more akin to photography than to typography).
In many domains, such as desktop publishing, engineering, and business, a description of a document based on 2D computer graphics techniques can be much smaller than the corresponding digital image—often by a factor of 1/1000 or more. This representation is also more flexible since it can be rendered at different resolutions to suit different output devices. For these reasons, documents and illustrations are often stored or transmitted as 2D graphic files.
