Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/33025
BY AASHISH CHAUDHARY AND JEFF BAUMES Is What You See, What You Get? Geospatial Visualizations Address Scale and Usability nlimited geospatial information now is at everyone’s fingertips with the proliferation of GPS-embedded mobile devices and large online geospatial databases. To fully understand these data and make wise decisions, more people are turn- ing to informatics and geospatial visualization, which are used to solve many real-world problems. To effectively gather information from data, it’s critical to address scalability and intuitive user interac- tions and visualizations. New geospatial analysis and visualization techniques are being used in fields such as video analysis for national defense, urban planning and hydrology. Why Having Data Isn’t Good Enough Anymore People are realizing that data are only useful if they can find the relevant pieces of data to make better deci- sions. This has broad applicability, from finding a movie to watch to elected officials deciding how much funding to allocate for an aging bridge. Information can easily be obtained, but how can it be sorted, organized, made sense of and acted on? The field of informatics solves this challenge by taking large amounts of data and pro- cessing them into meaningful, truthful insights. In informatics, two main challenges arise when com- puters try to condense information down to meaningful concepts: disorganization and size. Some information is available in neat, organized tables, ready for users to pull out the needed pieces, but most is scattered across and hidden in news articles, blog posts and poorly organized lists. 26 GEO W ORLD / M AY 2O11 Researchers are feverishly working on new ways to retrieve key ideas and facts from these types of messy data sources. For example, services such as Google News use computers that constantly “read” news articles and posts worldwide, and then automati- cally rank them by popularity, group them by topic, or organize them based on what the computer thinks is important to viewers. Researchers at places such as the University of California, Irvine, and Sandia National Laboratories are investigating the next approaches to sort through large amounts of documents using power- ful supercomputers. The other obstacle is the sheer volume of data. It’s difficult to use informatics techniques that only work on data of limited size. Facebook, Google and Twitter have data centers that constantly process huge quantities of information to deliver timely and relevant information and advertisements to each person cur- rently logged on. Informatics is a key tool, but it’s not enough to sim- ply find these insights that explain the data. Geospatial visualization bridges the gap from computer number- crunching to human understanding. If informatics is compared to finding the paths in a forest, visualization is like creating a visual map of those paths so a per- son can navigate through the forest with ease. Most people today are familiar with basic geospatial visualizations such as weather maps and Web sites for driving directions. The news media are starting to test more-complex geospatial visualizations such as online interactive maps to help navigate politicians’ stances Industry Trends