Creation and collaboration: engaging new audiences for information visualization

In recent years we have seen information visualization technology move from an advanced research topic to mainstream adoption in both commercial and personal use. This move is in part due to many businesses recognizing the need for more effective tools for extracting knowledge from the data warehouses they are gathering. Increased mainstream interest is also a result of more exposure to advanced interfaces in contemporary online media. The adoption of information visualization technologies by lay users – as opposed to the traditional information visualization audience of scientists and analysts – has important implications for visualization research, design and development. Since we cannot expect each of these lay users to design their own visualizations, we have to provide them tools that make it easy to create and deploy visualizations of their datasets