Beyond the Screen Map Exploration for Environmental Scenarios

When managing large amounts of data, the need of extracting rele- vant information from them and represent it in an intuitive way is crucial in or- der to provide expert and end users with an initial overview of scenarios of in- terest. Researchers from the Geographic Information (GI) community are focus- ing their efforts towards this goal and aim at defining methods and techniques for supporting those activities. In this paper, we describe a visualization tech- nique useful to support users to synthesize large amounts of data and represent them through a visual metaphor for a schematic representation. The proposed approach allows obtaining a qualitative representation of areal distributions of phenomena which results valuable in order to convey relevant information and provide for an overview weighted with respect to parameters significant to the involved users. An initial experimentation has been conducted by implementing a GIS-based prototype embedding an environmental scenario concerning fire events stored as raster images.