Knowledge mining with VxInsight: Discovery through interaction

The explosive growth in the availability of information is overwhelming tra ditional information management systems. Although individual pieces of info rmation have become easy to find, the larger context in which they exist ha s become harder to track. These contextual questions are ideally suited to visualization since the human visual system is remarkably adept at interpre ting large quantities of information, and at detecting patterns and anomali es. The challenge is to present the information in a manner that maximally leverages our visual skills. This paper discusses a set of properties that such a presentation should have, and describes the design and functionality of VxInsight, a visualization tool built to these principles.