Abstract: Recent lively advances in information technology, specifically in internet, social networks and big data have highlighted the increasing importance in the field of visualization. The role of visualization as an important mechanism for visualizing and analyzing multidimensional big data is more vital now. Despite, the agreement on its importance in various fields, the concept of visualization and visualization pipeline need to be defined clearly. In this study, we survey a collection of definitions of visualization each of which sees the visualization from different perspectives and then, we propose set of guidelines that help in defining visualization. In addition, we survey set of visualization pipelines to make the definition of visualization more practical and we also propose a list of guidelines to improve the process of creating visualization pipelines. Lastly, we listed different taxonomies of interaction techniques and then we mapped the interaction techniques to the stages that suit them in the visualization pipeline.