Keynote: In Varietate Concordia: How Software Visualization and Information Visualization Have Evolved From, Around, and Along Each Other
Alexandru Cristian Telea · 2023
Software visualization (softvis) and information visualization (infovis) have a long, interconnected, and complex joint history. Originally appearing as a subdomain of infovis which focuses on solving problems coming from the software engineering domain, softvis has grown in the last two decades to become a selfstanding field with distinct challenges, key results, events, and community. In the same time, the independent growth of the two fields has made the transfer of ideas, techniques, methods, application cases, and researchers between the two domains increasingly challenges. In this talk, I will present a history of this highly dynamic process and argue about the need for raprochemment of infovis and softvis. This need is supported by two key aspects identified and further discussed: (1) Complementarity of the two fields advocates for more interaction, as shown by success stories from softvis which led to entirely novel branches of development into the infovis field and, conversely, recent key developments in infovis which offer strong potential to be picked up to address existing key challenges in softvis. (2) Commonality, in terms of both fields essentially aiming to solve very similar visualization problems that address very similar data and using related visualization pipelines, advocates on an increasingly joint approach in their further development.