2007 Year End Highlights

Improvise - Rapid Visual Analytics Application Builder: The Improvise visualization system has become a highly effective scientific testbed for rapid development and evaluation of new highly interactive visual analysis techniques that promise to extend significantly the ability of analysts to ask complex questions about high-dimensional data spanning multiple databases. Two such techniques, Cross-Filtered Views and Attribute Relationship Graphs, are the basis for nearly a dozen interactive tools developed in Improvise in the past year for analyzing events and groups across space and time, culminating in the InfoVis 2007 Contest-winning 'Cinegraph' visualization of social relationships.

Extracting and geographically contextualizing entities and relations from text: A core research objective for NEVAC is to leverage implicit geographic and temporal information in a range of text sources that include FEMA and other situation reports, scientific publications, news reports, and other sources. Three complementary tools developments were combined this year to produce a suite of web-based, geographic information retrieval, entity and relation extraction, geotagging and mapping tools. These include FactXtractor (also now used in the Scalable Reasoning System from PNNL), FEMARepViz (an application for automatically mapping locations of events mentioned in FEMA situation reports, and the Concept Discovery Application (CDA) targeted to geographic contextualization of information appearing in news stories. A key development is combination of these tools into an application that supports use of information extracted from situation reports to guide search of the news media for local information to support situation assessment and monitoring during disaster events such as hurricane Katrina.

Managing and leveraging knowledge: During 2007, NEVAC researchers made substantial progress on development of a geographically-enabled knowledge visualization and analysis environment that supports flexible knowledge browsing, scales to large knowledge corpuses, and facilitates comparison of knowledge structures, based on a variety of approaches. An open architecture is being developed, allowing runtime connections to be made to web mapping applications, knowledge extraction services, visualization tools and knowledge collections such as WordNet and CiteSeer. The approach has been implemented in ConceptVista, an open source knowledge management software application. A key achievement is conceptualization and implementation of knowledge perspectives, which can be used to filter a large, complex knowledge representation into a relevant and human comprehensible display (instead of an unreadable knowledge cloud). Target applications included support for geographically-enabled knowledge management in the domains of public health and natural disaster threats.

NeoCITIES: Understanding and Enabling Group Work with Information Technology: NeoCITIES is a team resource allocation simulation designed to emulate complex functions involved in the resource management of a city's emergency services. Crisis management is conducted through the joint interaction of three distinct roles of Police, Fire/EMS, and Hazardous Materials personnel. In 2007, two major NeoCITIES advances were achieved. First, NeoCITIES-Geo was developed and implemented -- a web map services-based version of the NeoCITIES simulation incorporating geospatial tools that include an interactive map, geo- chat and elementary GIS analysis features. This simulation will help us explore and understand the impact of geo collaborative tools on the nature of team communication and response to emergency crisis situations. Second, NeoCITIES transactive memory system is a new prototype that provides a shared interactive environment to keep track of a city's emergency service resources both spatially and temporally and enable key players to benefit from each other's knowledge and expertise in responding to crisis situations through external representation on a shared platform. Both developments will be used to support experimental studies in 2008 designed to better understand interactions between technology and crisis management decision making in time-critical emergency situations.

GeoCAM: Representing, extracting, mapping, and interpreting movement references in text: NGA has awarded a NURI grant to Penn State NEVAC researchers Alan MacEachren and Prasenjit Mitra, along with their colleague Alex Klippel to carry out research on extracting geographic information from text documents. Specifically, the project The focus is on identifying, extracting, interpreting, and mapping statements about movement in text (e.g., An Embassy guard spotted a bomb on the street some 40 feet from the U.S. Embassy. It Is believed that the device was Jarred loose from a vehicle that passed over tram tracks at the intersection where the Embassy is located.). The research team will apply a comprehensive and integrated approach to the problem in which information contained in geographic databases and other sources is used iteratively together with natural language processing methods to interpret geographic references in context. For details, see the GeoCAM website.