Welcome to the GeoVISTA Center, the Pennsylvania State University Geographic Visualization Science, Technology, and Applications Center.The GeoVISTA Center conducts information and cognitive science research focused on five themes:

• Geographic Representation: To understand the world, we must represent it. Cartography has addressed this challenge for centuries and we extend that tradition through innovative research on multivariate, space-time, and multiscale representation. This research is complemented by development of new strategies for database representation.
• Geovisual Analytics: To cope with increasing geospatial data profusion one focus for our research is to integrate visual, statistical, and computational methods for representation, analysis, knowledge construction, and sensemaking using both multivariate and heterogenous geospatial information.
• Knowledge Management & Geocollaboration: To support work with geospatial information by individuals and groups, we are addressing the computational and human issues underling technologies to facilitate group work and developing the semantic frameworks necessary to integrate, manage, and access data and knowledge generated by multiple organizations.
• Spatial Cognition & Human Factors: Our goal here is to advance understanding of spatial cognition and use that understanding to guide development of new methods and tools for interacting with geospatial information, both intuitively and successfully.
• Risk Assessment & Spatial Decision Support: Our work here leverages our basic research in the other four areas to develop methods and tools that are particularly relevant to integrating and using geospatial information for risk assessment & decision support.

Established in 1998, GeoVISTA is based in Geography and has faculty and graduate student affiliates in multiple colleges on campus. Its research is interdisciplinary and, over the past decade, emphasis has expanded from geovisualization to all aspects of GIScience and related information sciences.

At Penn State, the GeoVISTA Center has been instrumental in building strong ties with the College of Information Sciences and Technology and with faculty at the Hershey Medical School. In addition, GeoVISTA has recently initiated a cross-campus pilot project with the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, on Geovisual Analytics for Infectious Disease Dynamics (funded jointly by the Institutes for Energy and the Environment, Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, and Social Science Research Institute).

Again, we welcome you at GeoVISTA and invite you to browse our web site. If you have any questions, suggestions, ideas or comments, please feel free to contact us. We will be glad to communicate with you.