With a Foreword by Stuart Card. Information visualization is the design and creation of interactive graphic depictions of information by combining principles in the disciplines of graphic design, cognitive science, and interactive computer graphics. This book describes a framework to make information visualization systems easier to develop through the creation of a reference model. It develops and discusses the general utility of this Data State Model, and validates it by applying it to various visualization techniques and showing several systems that illustrate issues such as how to model operators and interactions in visualization systems. The book also applies this reference model to make information visualization more accessible to potential users by creating a 'Visualization Spreadsheet', where each cell can contain an entire set of data represented using interactive graphics.