Preface

The term visualization can refer to (1) the process of generating graphical representations from non-graphical data or information, or (2) the graphical representations themselves. This dissertation opts for definition (2), and so all representations of data or information such as isosurfaces [63], volumes [21], and Treemaps [72] will be referred to as visualizations. To distinguish between definition (1), this dissertation will explicitly refer to the process of generating visualizations as visualization generation or the visualization process. iv Constructing visualizations using modular visualization environments (MVEs) requires knowledge about visualization transformation theory as well as implementation specific de-tails about how to programmatically chain together relevant sets of modules into pipe and filter-like architectures known as pipelines. Constructing visualization pipelines introduces a number of challenges including: understanding how to transform raw data into forms that can be ingested by MVEs, identifying target modules that map data into graphical data, and understanding how to further transform resulting graphical data into forms tha