Computation has become integral part of scientific inquiry.  In the fields of chemistry, biology, genetics, physics, and every other area of the sciences, modeling, simulation, and computation provide new insights.  Just as important as the data and the algorithms that produce the data is the ability of researchers to interperet complex information.  Scientific visualization techniques allow researchers to comprehend their data, understand relationships, and acheive new insights into their research.

Scientific visualization brings together computation, computer graphics, domain science, and graphic arts to turn huge numerical data sets into meaningful graphical representations.  These representations can be a picture, an animation, or a fully interactive application that allows a researcher to manipulate and ask new questions about their data.

Information visualization is a related field.  Information visualization is similar to scientific visualization, but deals with information that does not have a 2D or 3D structure.  An example of information visualization would be a graphic representation of the relation between documents in an archive.