Information visualization for the taking of decisions

Vast amounts of useful information are accessible to us in multiple formats: from structured information in databases to organized documents. However, nobody is able to read this enormous quantity of information since we do not have enough time to do it. Computer hardware and software developments have encouraged the analysis of great amounts of information and they have also supported real-time, dynamic, interactive and visual representations. So we prefer graphs, charts, and maps to interpret this information and make decisions. Data Mining, Text Mining or Web Mining techniques would not be very useful for taking a decision if we could not take advantage from the graphs. The main advantage of these graphical presentations is that we could visualize a great amount of data in a very small amount of space and by using little time. The user can more rapidly explore the information. There is a strong relationship between the Mining and the information visualization. There is a need for collecting together the results to date, organizing them, understanding the essence of this field and providing materials for the scientific community. The purpose of this paper is clear: to help the structure of the field, and to suggest possible applications. We will explore some aspects as to how space is used in information visualization or how document collections can be transformed and visualized. We will point out how Data Mining results could serve Business Intelligence applications or Foresight techniques by the creation of scenarios.