A multi-disciplinary perspective on the built environment: Space Syntax and cartography – the communication challenge

8-11 June 2009

Digital representation of park use and visual analysis of visitor activities

Urban public parks can serve an important function by contributing to urban citizens' quality of life. At the same time, they can be the location of processes of displacement and exclusion. Despite this ambiguous role, little is known about actual park use patterns. To learn more about park use in three parks in Zurich, Switzerland, extensive data on visitor activities was collected using a new method based on direct recording via a portable GIS solution. Then, the data was analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods. This paper examines whether geographic visualization of these data can help domain experts like landscape designers and park managers to assess park use. To maximize accessibility, the visualizations are made available through a web-interface of a common, off-the-shelf GIS. The technical limitations imposed by this choice are critically assessed, before the available visualization techniques are evaluated in respect to the needs and tasks of practitioners with limited knowledge on spatial analysis and GIS. Key criteria are each technique's level of abstraction and graphical complexity. The utility and suitability of the visualization techniques is characterized for the distinct phases of exploration, analysis and synthesis. The findings suggest that for a target user group of practitioners, a combination of dot maps showing the raw data and surface maps showing derived density values for several attributes serves the purpose of knowledge generation best

Initiating dialogue between stakeholders and establishing a common language for community severance through cross disciplinary workshops

The concept of community severance has slowly been making its way into concrete transport plans and policies but it still lacks a consensual definition. This is because the issue has been approached by researchers from a range of disciplines, which have specific and diverse ways of constructing scientific knowledge. The objective of this paper, the first in a series of working papers to be generated by the Street Mobility and Network Accessibility research project is to build bridges between these different approaches and provide a base for the integration of community severance into public policy. The paper is the outcome of a series of workshops attended by a cross-disciplinary team of researchers and stakeholders, including policy-makers and local practitioners. On the basis of these discussions, a framework for cross-disciplinary research on community severance is developed, taking into consideration the chain of direct and indirect effects of transport infrastructure and motorised traffic and the range and complexity in the methodologies used for analysing and formulating solutions to the problem. In a second stage, we examine the consistency between this framework and the opinions and experiences of stakeholders

The GI-Learner Approach: Learning Lines for Geospatial Thinking in Secondary Schools

This paper introduces basic considerations that inform education for geospatial thinking, as proposed in the KA2 Erasmus Plus GI-Learner project. It reports on some initial state-of-the-art activities of the project, presents a list of GI-Learner competences based on a broad literature review and establishes a roadmap for future support activities for geospatial learning

Unfolding -- A library for interactive maps

Visualizing data with geo-spatial properties has become more important and prevalent due to the wide spread dissemination of devices, sensors, databases, and services with references to the physical world. Yet, with existing tools it is often difficult to create interactive geovisualizations tailored for a particular domain or a specific dataset. We present Unfolding, a library for interactive maps and data visualization. Unfolding provides an API for designers to quickly create and customize geo-visualizations. In this paper, we describe the design criteria, the development process, and the functionalities of Unfolding. We demonstrate its versatility in use through a collection of examples. Results from a user survey suggests programmers find the library easy to learn and to use

The State of the Art in Cartograms

Cartograms combine statistical and geographical information in thematic maps, where areas of geographical regions (e.g., countries, states) are scaled in proportion to some statistic (e.g., population, income). Cartograms make it possible to gain insight into patterns and trends in the world around us and have been very popular visualizations for geo-referenced data for over a century. This work surveys cartogram research in visualization, cartography and geometry, covering a broad spectrum of different cartogram types: from the traditional rectangular and table cartograms, to Dorling and diffusion cartograms. A particular focus is the study of the major cartogram dimensions: statistical accuracy, geographical accuracy, and topological accuracy. We review the history of cartograms, describe the algorithms for generating them, and consider task taxonomies. We also review quantitative and qualitative evaluations, and we use these to arrive at design guidelines and research challenges