Guest Editorial: Special Section on Visual Analytics

ISUAL analytics is the science of analytical reasoning supportedbyhighlyinteractivevisualinterfaces.People use visual analytics tools and techniques to synthesize information; derive insight from massive, dynamic, and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments; and communicate assessments effectively for action. The issues stimulating this body of research provide a grandchallengeinscience:turninginformationoverloadinto the opportunity of the decade. Visual analytics requires interdisciplinary science beyond traditional scientific and information visualization to include statistics, mathematics, knowledge representation, management and discovery technologies, cognitive and perceptual sciences, decision sciences, and more. An important research agenda to develop the next generation suite of visual analytics technologies is described in the book Illuminating the Path: The Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics, which is available at http:// nvac.pnl.gov/agenda.stm. The papers in this special section address a number of the issues described in the visual analytics research agenda. They are grouped into five major areas: multidimensional data, graphs and networks, communication network analysis, space and time, and fundamentals. The first two papers address issues of visual analysis of multidimensional data. The first paper, “High-Dimensional