Copyright © 2017 by Author/s and Licensed by Lectito BV, Netherlands. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 2(3), 19 ISSN: 2468-4376 Analysis of Current Visualization Techniques and Main Challenges for the Future Manuel Pérez Cota 1 *, María Díaz Rodríguez 1 , Miguel Ramón González-Castro 1 , Ramiro Manuel Moreira Gonçalves 2 1 University of Vigo, SPAIN 1 University of Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro, PORTUGAL *Corresponding Author: mpcota@uvigo.es Citation: Cota, M.P., Rodríguez, M.D., González-Castro, M.R. and Gonçalves, R.M.M. (2017). Analysis of Current Visualization Techniques and Main Challenges for the Future. Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 2(3), 19. https://doi.org/10.20897/jisem.201719 Published: August 29, 2017 ABSTRACT The big amount of data generated nowadays are being used by Big Data tools to generate knowledge and to facilitate the decision-making. However, this situation creates a new challenge: how to visualize all these data without losing mid/long term crucial information. The purpose of this article is to analyze the state of the art on massive data visualization, main problems and challenges of information representation current techniques as well as the evolution of the tools and the future of them, in other words, new functionalities to offer. Keywords: masive data visualization, big data, 3D, interactive visualization, visualization tools INTRODUCTION Big Data new technologies are able to handle big amounts of data with the goal of obtaining new knowledge that facilitates the decision-making. However, this process that starts from data to obtain information and, from here, to achieve knowledge, is not only focused on the treatment of the data, but that all this has no value if they cannot be displayed in the right way so that the user understands what is being shown and not be overwhelmed by complex and difficult to understand visualizations. This paper analyses, therefore, what are the current visualization tools explaining, first, which are the current techniques of visualization, focused mainly on static representations of the information. Next, we analyze the main problems and challenges in the field of data visualization, where we have examined the main tools of the market describing four basic points: data loading, visualization of this same data, advantages and disadvantages from the users’ perspective. Once the main problems with which data visualization have been studied, where information loss is a crucial point, the direction of the market and how the 3D tools can be used to obtain a new knowledge that the 2D visualization techniques are not able to display, is analyzed. The article finishes by commenting on the advantages and disadvantages of data representation in three dimensions. CURRENT TECHNIQUES FOR VISUALIZING INFORMATION Visual representation of the data is a crucial step in Big Data to be able to obtain all the benefits that this technology provides. Among the main benefits of visualization tools (Wang et al., 2015; Gonçalves et al., 2015; Branco et al., 2015; Leite et al., 2016), improved decision-making is the main one, but other important aspects to