From GeoVisualization to visual-analytics: methodologies and techniques for human-information discourse

2010 - 2011The objective of our research is to give support to decision makers when facing problems which require rapid solutions in spite of the complexity of scenarios under investigation. In order to achieve this goal our studies have been focused on GeoVisualization and GeoVisual Analytics research field, which play a relevant role in this scope, because they exploit results from several disciplines, such as exploratory data analysis and GIScience, to provide expert users with highly interactive tools by which they can both visually synthesize information from large datasets and perform complex analytical tasks. The research we are carrying out along this line is meant to develop software applications capable both to build an immediate overview of a scenario and to explore elements featuring it. To this aim, we are defining methodologies and techniques which embed key aspects from different disciplines, such as augmented reality and location-based services. Their integration is targeted to realize advanced tools where the geographic component role is primary and is meant to contribute to a human-information discourse... [edited by author]X n.s

Label Number Maximization in the Slider Model (Extended Abstract)

We consider the NP-hard label number maximization problem lnm: Given a set of rectangular labels, each of which belongs to a point feature in the plane, the task is to find a labeling for a largest subset of the labels. A labeling is a placement such that none of the labels overlap and each is placed so that its boundary touches the corresponding point feature. The purpose of this paper is twofold: We present a new force-based simulated annealing algorithm to heuristically solve the problem and we provide the results of a very thorough experimental comparison of the best known labeling methods on widely used benchmark sets. The design of our new method has been guided by the goal to produce labelings that are similar to the results of an experienced human performing the same task. So we are not only looking for a labeling where the number of labels placed is high but also where the distribution of the placed labels is good. Our experimental results show that the new algorithm outperforms the other methods in terms of quality while still being reasonably fast and confirm that the simulated annealing method is well-suited for map labeling problems