Data visualization or data visualisation is viewed by many disciplines as a modern equivalent of visual communication. It is not owned by any one field, but rather finds interpretation across many (e.g. it is viewed as a modern branch of descriptive statistics by some, but also as a grounded theory development tool by others). It involves the creation and study of the visual representation of data, meaning "information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information".