Visual analytics for the strategic decision making process

The collection and storage Of huge amounts of data is no longer a challenge by itself. However, rapidly growing data repositories are creating considerable challenges in many application areas. Visualizations that worked well with a few data items now produce confusing or illegible displays. Decision-makers struggle to act based on a severely restricted understanding of the situation. The goal of Visual Analytics is to overcome this information overload and create new opportunities with these large amounts of data and information. The key challenge is to intelligently combine visualization techniques and analytic algorithms, and to enable the human expert to guide the decision making process. This chapter covers interesting and relevant previous work on Situation awareness, naturalistic decision making, and decision-centred Visualization. These concepts are put into the context of Visual Analytics research and are further illustrated by application examples.