Multidimensional scaling: Concepts and applications

‘Multidimensional Scaling’ is the name of a set of procedures with the objective of data representation in a graphical plot when some information about similarities between objects is known. The history of these procedures began with Torgeson's work in 1952 who gave the preliminary ideas. Since then many investigators have developed other works with one only aim: to obtain a euclidean representation most similar to the starting proximities between objects. In this paper we show the main purposes and some essential concepts of this theme.