Comprehending geographic scenarios through visual summaries

Abstract

In the last decade, the need to support decision makers in solving problems related to a territory and its phenomena has stimulated Geographic Information Visualization (GeoVis) researchers to propose highly interactive visualization tools able to both synthesize information from large datasets and perform complex analytical tasks. The goal of the present paper is to propose two GeoVis methods based on a recent InfoVis technique, known as Chorem and Tag Cloud, which combines advanced GeoVis techniques for visualizing and analyzing geographic data and related spatio-temporal phenomena. The methods elaborate a simplified maps in order to help to identify significant geospatial information, data, and knowledge by supporting analytical processes that join innate human abilities of vision and cognition with computer based visual interfaces. As initial result a system prototypes have been realized in order to obtain an overview of large dataset. They are focused on data extraction and aggregation, and output visualization, and adopt various techniques to allow users to select data to visualize starting from a geographic dataset