HIS special section contains extended versions of nine papers published at the IEEE Visualization 2005 (VIS 2005) conference. The program committee cochairs selected these papers by taking into account the detailed reviews from external referees and program committee members. Authors were invited to submit a substantially revised and extended version of their manuscripts. Each submitted paper went through the complete IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) peer review process, including multiple rounds of reviews. For VIS 2005, the application and research papers were folded into a single track, and all papers were published together, without explicit classification information. At the conference, the talks were organized by topic, with both application and research papers presented in the same session, when appropriate. This special section contains revised versions of both application and research papers. The first paper, “Views on Visualization,” by Jarke J. van Wijk, is based on his “best research paper award winning” paper. It provides a thought-provoking look at the state of visualization research, with an emphasis on the effectiveness of visualization techniques on a number of particular applications. It builds on the author’s extensive experience and stature as one of the leading figures in the field, having published extensively in the IEEE Visualization and Information Visualization conferences. We note that this is not a typical research paper, however, it is important reading for anyone who has interest in visualization as a scientific discipline. The goal of visualization is not necessarily to generate beautiful pictures, but to create insightful visual representations that faithfully represent the scientific truth. Issues of precision are extremely important. Xiaoru Yuan, Minh. X. Nguyen, Baoquan Chen, and David H. Porter present a set of techniques for faithfully rendering high-dynamic volume data in their paper, “HDR VolVis: High Dynamic Range Volume Visualization.” They received the best application paper award for their groundbreaking work in this area. Their paper provides convincing evidence that properly handling precision and dynamic range issues are key to maintaining the integrity of the scientific data, and are bound to be ever more important as the field expands. In modern applications, many numerical solutions of simulations of experiments are done using high-order basis functions.Thistrendislikelytoincreaseasweunderstandthe numericalmethodsbetter,andareabletodevelopmorestable and efficient techniques for handling high-order finite elements, which often lead to a substantially smaller number of elementsfor agiven accuracy of the solution. The paper by