On encouraging coupled views for visualization exploration

Scientific visualization, especially visualization exploration, enables information:to be investigated and better understood. Exploration enables hands-on experimentation with the displayed visualizations and the underlying data. Most exploration techniques, by their nature, generate multiple realizations and many data instances. Thus, to best understand the information in coincident views, the manipulation information within one view may be 'directed' to other related views. These multiple views may be described as being closely coupled. Within this paper we advocate the use of coupled views for scientific visualization exploration. We describe, some key concepts of coupled views for visualization exploration and present: how to encourage their use. The key concepts include: the scope of the correlation (between two specific views or many realizations), who initiates the correlation (whether the user or the system) and issues about 'what is correlated' (objects within a view, or the whole viewport).