The following computer graphics terms will be used when discussing this topic:

Visualization

The process or result of displaying scientific data in a way that conveys information about the structure and patterns it contains.

Visualization pipeline

A series of operations that together serve to produce a visualization from one or more data sources.

Pipeline Node

An individual component of a visualization pipeline. ParaView has two kinds of pipeline nodes: Source and Filter.

Source

A top level node of a visualization pipeline whose output data is used by later nodes in the pipeline. Sources can generate data from parameters or read it from a file.

Filter

A single step of a visualization pipeline that takes input data and outputs additional or transformed data that is used by later nodes in the pipeline.

State

The current visualization data in ParaView, consisting of the nodes in the visualization pipeline, the property settings of those nodes and the rendering Layouts.

Bounding Box

A cuboid that tightly but completely surrounds the contents of the geometry in a pipeline node. Each node's bounding box is orthogonally aligned to the axes of that node.

Resolution

The level of refinement used when approximating a smooth surface with a finite set of polygons.

Color ramp

An association of two or more colors with real numbers in a fixed range, which allows any number in that range to be mapped to a specific interpolated color.

Data point / Sample point

An element of a dataset that consists of a geometric location plus additional data values that are associated with that spatial location. May be called "sample points" when the data was sampled from another data source.

Normal vector

A unit length vector stored at a data point that has the same dimension as the point's geometric location and which is oriented orthogonally to the surface that contains the data point.

Texture coordinates

A vector stored at a data point that serves as an index into a separate dataset and which is often used to map that second dataset onto the first. A common use is to apply a 2D "texture map" onto a 3D surface to alter its surface coloration.

Isosurface

For a grid-based dataset having a scalar data value at each point, this surface is generated such that it passes through all spatial locations within the grid where the interpolated value of the scalar data is approximately equal to a given number.

Glyph

A small three dimensional object placed at some of a dataset's points and manipulated such that some of its properties (size, color, orientation) convey information about the data values at those points.

Streamline

Lines generated by interpolating across multiple vector data values in a dataset. Used to convey a sense of flow through a grid dataset.