Groups usually carry out science and decision-making activities involving geographic information. However, current mapping and related geospatial technologies are not group-friendly, and attempts to extend (or reinvent) technologies for group use have been largely ad hoc. Elsewhere, we have developed a comprehensive conceptual approach to geocollaboration that provides a framework for both studying collaborative work with geospatial information (and technologies) and the development of new technologies designed to support group work. We are applying that approach to a range of prototype systems that support same- and different-place as well as same- and different-time group activities.Our focus in this paper is on same-time, same-place group work environments that enable that work through use of large-screen displays supporting natural, human-system dialogue and multi-user interaction. Two environments are described and compared. Both make use of hand gestures as a mechanism for specifying display locations. One adopts a combined wall map/white board metaphor while the other adopts a drafting table metaphor. We focus on crisis management as a typical use case.
Abstract : This report documents Pennsylvania State University's (PSU) research on place-focused analysis of microblogs, specifically Twitter. The first section of the report identifies three categories of location information related to tweets: the location where a tweet originates, places mentioned in tweets, and the profile location of the tweeter. The report summarizes previous research on location information and contributes new insights resulting from additional PSU analysis. The second section of the report focuses on the visualization of place information. Place trees, place clouds, and place-coreferencing are introduced in the context of the SensePlace2 system. The third section of the report summarizes the SensePlace2 system architecture enhancements required to support the dynamic visualization of Twitter location information, including the development of an innovative user interface coordination mechanism and implementation of faceted search using Apache Solr.
High quality graphics aid federal government agencies in summarizing, analyzing, and disseminating federal statistical summaries, especially large highly complex summaries. The research efforts in Penn State Geography and the GeoVISTA Center (www.geovista.psu.edu), supported by a NSF Digital Government grant (#99883451), continue to develop web-based applications for exploring, analyzing, and presenting high dimensional geospatial data in ways that support exploration and dissemination. Progress has been achieved in the form of added visualization tools (applications and applets) in GeoVISTA Studio, a Java-based programming free visualization environment. GeoVISTA Studio is freely available to government agencies at www.geovistastudio.psu.edu, or at www.sourceforge.net. New visualization tools and functionalities added or enhanced this year include extentions to univariate and bivariate maps, a generic manipulable matrix, new parallel coordinate plot, a speadsheet, conditioning and visual classification tools.
Accuracy of thematic maps is identified as having two components: planimetric accuracy and data representation accuracy. The first is of only minor concern for thematic maps. Data representation accuracy, however, is at least as significant to map effectiveness as are the perceptual and cognitive aspects of map reading that have been given so much attention in recent years. The focus of the study presented is on data representation accuracy considering the specific case of choropleth maps. It is demonstrated that three factors, enumeration unit size, enumeration unit compactness, and variability of the distributions mapped are significant in determining enumeration unit aggregate value accuracy and, therefore, map accuracy. Based on experimental results, it is suggested that potential accuracy of choropleth maps could be predicted through measurement of these characteristics. A second experiment is used to demonstrate the applicability of this method to predicting overall choropleth map accuracy as well as the geographic distribution of any error present in the map.
This article focuses on integrating computational and visual methods in a system that supports analysts to identify, extract, map, and relate linguistic accounts of movement. We address two objectives: (1) build the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical framework needed to represent and interpret human-generated directions; and (2) design and implement a geovisual analytics workspace for direction document analysis. We have built a set of geo-enabled, computational methods to identify documents containing movement statements, and a visual analytics environment that uses natural language processing methods iteratively with geographic database support to extract, interpret, and map geographic movement references in context. Additionally, analysts can provide feedback to improve computational results. To demonstrate the value of this integrative approach, we have realized a proof-of-concept implementation focusing on identifying and processing documents that contain human-generated route directions. Using our visual analytic interface, an analyst can explore the results, provide feedback to improve those results, pose queries against a database of route directions, and interactively represent the route on a map.
Ease of access to health care is of great importance in any country but particularly in countries such as Niger where restricted access can put people at risk of mortality from diseases such as measles, meningitis, polio, pneumonia and malaria. This paper analyzes the physical access of populations to health facilities within Niger with an emphasis on the effect of seasonal conditions and the implications of these conditions in terms of availability of adequate health services, provision of drugs and vaccinations. The majority of the transport within Niger is pedestrian, thus the paper emphasizes access by those walking to facilities for care. Further analysis compared the change in accessibility for vehicular travel since public health workers do travel by vehicle when carrying out vaccination campaigns and related proactive health care activities. The majority of the roads in Niger are non-paved (90%). Six districts, mainly in the region of Tahoua lack medical facilities. Patient to health facility ratios were best in Agadez with 7000 people served per health facility. During the dry season 39% of the population was within 1-hours walk to a health center, with the percentage decreasing to 24% during the wet season. Further analyses revealed that vaccination rates were strongly correlated with distance. Children living in clusters within 1-hour of a health center had 1.88 times higher odds of complete vaccination by age 1-year compared to children living in clusters further from a health center (p < 0.05). Three key geographic areas were highlighted where access to health centers took greater than 4 h walk during the wet and dry season. Access for more than 730,000 people can be improved in these areas with the addition of 17 health facilities to the current total of 504 during the dry season (260,000 during the wet season). This study highlights critical areas in Niger where health services/facilities are lacking. A second finding is that population served by health facilities will be severely overestimated if assessments are solely conducted during the dry season. Mapped outputs can be used for future decision making processes and analysis.
Geospatial information is critical to effective, collaborative decision-making during emergency management situations; however conventional GIS are not suited for multi-user access and high-level abstract queries. Currently, decision makers do not always have the real time information they need; GIS analysts produce maps at the request of individual decision makers, often leading to overlapping requests with slow delivery times. In order to overcome these limitations, a paradigm shift in interface design for GIS is needed. The research reported upon here attempts to overcome analyst-driven, menu-controlled, keyboard and mouse operated GIS by designing a multimodal, multi-user GIS interface that puts geospatial data directly in the hands of decision makers. A large screen display is used for data visualization, and collaborative, multi-user interactions in emergency management are supported through voice and gesture recognition. Speech and gesture recognition is coupled with a knowledge-based dialogue management system for storing and retrieving geospatial data. This paper describes the first prototype and the insights gained for human-centered multimodal GIS interface design.
In this paper, we address the topic of user-centered design (UCD) for cartography, GIScience, and visual analytics. Interactive maps are ubiquitous in modern society, yet they often fail to “work” as they could or should. UCD describes the process of ensuring interface success—map-based or otherwise—by gathering input and feedback from target users throughout the design and development of the interface. We contribute to the expanding literature on UCD for interactive maps in two ways. First, we synthesize core concepts on UCD from cartography and related fields, as well as offer new ideas, in order to organize existing frameworks and recommendations regarding the UCD of interactive maps. Second, we report on a case study UCD process for GeoVISTA CrimeViz, an interactive and web-based mapping application supporting visual analytics of criminal activity in space and time. The GeoVISTA CrimeViz concept and interface were improved iteratively by working through a series of user→utility→usability loops in which target users provided input and feedback on needs and designs (user), prompting revisions to the conceptualization and functional requirements of the interface (utility), and ultimately leading to new mockups and prototypes of the interface (usability) for additional evaluation by target users (user… and so on). Together, the background review and case study offer guidance for applying UCD to interactive mapping projects, and demonstrate the benefit of including target users throughout design and development.
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