Twenty years ago, some can remember that twenty years ago, there were already big visualization projects in research institutions and these projects produced very useful and significant images for research. For example, very well known images concerned turbulence around the wings of aircrafts to minimise fuel consumption, to understand how to minimise fuel consumption, or medical images acquired through CAT scans, or popular videos of the ozone layer shrinking and enlarging itself in computer animation. So, the question can be: "is there any difference between this scientific research in visualization and what is being proposed by recent IV research"? And the general answer is that IV tends to focus on more abstract data. In scientific visualization usually we have the representation of physical objects, and this representation wants to be a high-fidelity representation, as detailed and realistic as possible, and you have the animation of physical phenomena, such as the ozone layer shrinking. In information visualization you can display information which might be completely abstract, have no physical counterpart, such as web-site access data, or maybe you can visualise information that has some relation with physical objects, for example stock-market data, but you are not interested in representing those physical objects, you are not interested into representing coins and dollar bills when you display stock-market data.