Visualization offers useful tools for understanding large data sets. The visualization techniques in this work, realized in the program GeoVis, depict static as well as dynamic geoscientific data through glyphs, surfaces and animation. The flight over a virtual landscape (where multidimensional data are represented by abstract glyphs) proves to be useful for the quick exploration of coherencies as well as differences in the data compound.

For centuries, geographic data has been visualized and published in the form of static maps and displays. However with the advent of geographic information systems (GIS) it becomes possible to make use of new electronical means for both publishing and visualizing geographic data. The paper describes the concept of a World Wide Web client that can directly request data from a GIS, displaying it as a three dimensional VRML world. For an evaluation of this concept and for performance testing, a first prototype has been realized.

No abstract available.

Meaningful scientific visualizations benefit the interpretation of scientific data, concepts and processes. To ensure meaningful visualizations, the visualization system needs to adapt to desires, disabilities and abilities of the user, interpretation aim, resources (hardware, software) available, and the form and content of the data to be visualized. We suggest describing these characteristics with four models: user model, problem domain/task model, resource model and data model. The paper makes suggestions for the generation of a user model as a basis for an adaptive visualization system. We propose to extract information about the user by involving the user in interactive computer tests and games. Relevant abilities tested are color perception, color memory, color ranking, mental rotation, and fine motor coordination.>