Animating Maps: Visual Analytics Meets GeoWeb 2.0 (original) (raw)

Exploratory visualization of temporal geospatial data using animation

2002

Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden vermenigvuldigd en/of openbaar gemaakt worden door middle van druk, fotokopie of op welke andere wijze dan ook zonder voorafgaande schrifttelijke toestemming van de auteur. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means, without written permission of the author. The financial support to undertake this work was made possible through the ITC/DGIS fund. Who modeled in me the zeal for pursuit of knowledge Learn from the mistakes of others-you can never live long enough to make them all yourself-John Luther Over the span of time that I spent working on this thesis I had the privilege of meeting and working with many individuals from all around the world. I am indebted to their friendship, advice, encouragement and criticism, aspects that have enormously contributed to my successful stay and study in the Netherlands. Though I might not be able to name all of these wonderfu...

Geospatial data exploration using interactive and intelligent cartographic animations

2001

At present, the use of cartographic animations in exploratory environments is characterized by a nature that is passive and that which is based on predetermined linear playback paths of the animation frames. By this, the animations are pre-designed to run with little or no interference from the viewers and only along specific predetermined story lines. Partly, the reason for this passivity that also translates into low levels of interactivity is the fact that during playback, each scene is viewed as a single graphic image whose content therein cannot be disintegrated into the individual geospatial features that it encompasses. This limits the geospatial features, their properties and the behaviors that the scenes can support and also reduces the level of interaction that a user can have with the individual geospatial features. For cartographic animations to be effective tools, their design should focus on developing interactive functionality that can present and analyze data, facilitate experimentation with different combinations of data, and forecast future scenarios during run-time. To geo-scientists, interactive tools are necessary for manipulating the images on display and its associated data sets. They similarly can reduce the geo-scientist's interpretative and judgmental workload during exploratory tasks. In this paper we outline an approach in cartographic animation design that enhances the level of interaction between user and the geospatial features embedded within the animation frames. We do this by giving more autonomy to the geospatial features in a way that their individual characteristics can be steered and tracked and their relationship to other features ascertained. This we do by incorporating an inference mechanism within an animated geospatial object thereby enabling an animation to autonomously make decisions and respond to the user and other geospatial object's actions during run-time. We demonstrate this functionality in a prototype that utilizes meteorological data sets to dynamically characterize and track weather patterns and resolve conflict situations during exploratory tasks.

Towards exploratory visualization of spatio-temporal data

2000

In the paper we focus on the problem of supporting visual exploration of data having spatial and temporal reference. We suggest some methods and tools based on cartographic visualization of the data. The tools involve a dynamic, highly interactive map display that can change its properties in real time, in particular, perform animation. We seek to advance our tools beyond mere animation towards facilitating exploratory analysis of spatio-temporal data. We diversify our approaches depending on properties of data and the character of their variation in time: changing existence, position, values of thematic attributes etc.

Creating and evaluating web-based visualizations of multi-dimensional spatiotemporal data

Proceedings of the ICA, 2019

In this article, we present a method for visualizing multi-dimensional spatio-temporal data in an interactive web-based geovisualization. Our case study focuses on publicly available weather data in Germany. After processing the data with Python and desktop GIS, we integrated the data as web services in a browser-based application. This application displays several weather parameters with different types of visualisations, such as static maps, animated maps and charts. The usability of the web-based geovisualization was evaluated with a free-examination and a goal-directed task, using eye-tracking analysis. The evaluation focused on the question how people use static maps, animated maps and charts, dependent on different tasks. The results suggest that visualization elements such as animated maps, static maps and charts are particularly useful for certain types of tasks, and that more answering time correlates with less accurate answers.

Audio Enhanced Map Animation – Testing Perception of Spatial and Temporal Relations

Map animation is a popular way to represent time in geovisuali-zation but studies of the effectiveness of map animations have produced mixed results. One potential way to improve map animations that has been discussed frequently but only sparsely studied in the literature is to add sound and make them multimodal. Therefore, this paper investigates whether sound can be used to enhance the usability of an animated map in an exploratory analysis context. Here, we focus on the perception of spatial and temporal relations between events. An internet-based user test was performed. The results show that adding sound does not impair the usability of map animations but fail to show that it improves it. The conclusion is that, rather than rejecting the hypothesis that sound can be used to improve map animations, the study was not appropriately designed to measure what it set out to measure. However, it produced some interesting results indicating that the benefit of sound in animated maps mig...

A Web-based Tool for Spatiotemporal Filtering and Continuous Animation

We describe MoveMap, a front-end tool for spatiotemporal databases with moving objects. Built over the Google Maps technology, is independent of any underlying data model or query language. It accommodates continuous temporal navigation and aims to both precision and abstraction by employing the Google Maps DirectionsService utility. For filtering and controlling the display, it includes a set of spatiotemporal operators that can be dynamically triggered, as the navigation proceeds in time. Spatiotemporal querying is thus performed in two different layers; first at the server level which can be accomplished by any underlying framework and second on the client through this mechanism of associating query conditions to browser events.

Defining visualization operations for temporal cartographic animation design

International journal of applied earth observation and …, 2002

Cartographic animation has emerged as a potentially effective visualization technique that has an intuitive power in representing dynamic geographical phenomena through its ability to show interrelations amongst geospatial data's components, location, attribute and time. Whereas cartographic animation has prominently featured in communicating geospatial information, their use as tools for visual exploration has been hampered by lack of the necessary functionality that is capable of allowing users to interact with the dynamic display. In this paper, we outline an approach that defines visualizations operations or basic visual actions that implement a viewer's task of exploration and characterization of geospatial structures in data or phenomena. The defined operations go along to reinforcing the quest in enabling users to perceive relationships and be able to manipulate geospatial data using more efficient visual tools while keeping low on cognitive demands.

Distributed Map Animation Services for Spatiotemporal Datasets

2012

Maps are an excellent way to present data that have spatial components. However, when the data being presented vary over time, a simple two-dimensional map ignores an important feature of the data. An animated map that shows a series of two-dimensional maps at successive points in time allows one to add a time dimension to the display of data. The study presented in this paper proposes a distributed service-oriented architecture to create map animations from spatiotemporal datasets. We extend open standards' GIS web services definitions with topic-based publish-subscribe paradigm, which best suits to the animation requirements. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated on exploratory data analysis on Turkey's earthquake seismic data records at the end of the paper. 1. Inroduction Vast amounts of data related to earth are time-series and spatial in nature. The geological studies are mostly based on spatial data analysis. To understand geographical phenomena it is imp...

Trajectory Data Visualization on Mobile Devices with Animated Maps

2016

With the increasing popularity of mobile devices (like smartphones and tablets) and georeferenced applications, more people record and analyse their own movement data. This pattern is noticeable with the increasing usage of mobile applications that, in addition to record the evolution of a person's location over time, also allow the visualization of that information, typically, in the form of 2D static maps, complemented with various representations to extract knowledge from the data. Despite the various studies addressing spatio-temporal data visualization, its application on mobile devices for the representation of personal trajectory data is still somewhat unexplored. Animated maps have been proposed as a potential intuitive and appealing technique for the visualization of information in a dynamic way, particularly for the detection of spatio-temporal data relations. We aim to address these issues by presenting a comparative study between static and animated representations o...