New concepts in exploration of spatial data

Traditionally, special issues start with a very positive statement on the topic addressed. Since one focus of the Commission is on identifying a research agenda, we depart from this tradition by opening the issue with Gahegan's critical look at some barriers to development of effective visualization methods that must be overcome before we can really profit from our new knowledge and tools. Hurdles he discusses are the speed of graphical rendering, user perceptual limits when exposed to complex combinations of graphics, the size of solution space (complexity of the visual assignment process), and the orientation of the user in artificial (virtual) reality.

This is followed by MacEachren and co-authors, who are working on the extraction of relevant data from large spatiotemporal data sets. In their approach they combine methods and techniques from two fields, knowledge discovery in databases and geographic (exploratory) visualization. The third 'conceptual' contribution, by Cartwright, focuses on the value and limits of the map-metaphor in a multimedia web environment. He introduces the GeoExploratorium, which contains several other metaphors to complement the map metaphor in opening up sources of geographical information.

Four Barriers to the Development of Effective Exploratory Visualisation Tools for the Geosciences. Gahegan, M. -- http://www.cs.curtin.edu.au/gis/visualisation/

Constructing knowledge from multivariate spatiotemporal data: Integrating Geographic Visualization with Knowledge Discovery in Database Methods. MacEachren, A.M., M. Wachowicz, R. Edsall, D. Haug & R. Masters -- http://www.geovista.psu.edu/publications/ijgis99/

Extending the map metaphor using web delivered multimedia. Cartwright, W. -- http://www.ls.rmit.edu.au/landinfo/geoexpl/qcliff.htm

 

Visualization tool/system development

Integration of visualization tools and application in particular problem domains

Commentary

Final Note