Home // GEOProcessing 2015, The Seventh International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems, Applications, and Services // View article

Temporally Transformed Map Animation for Visual Data Analysis

Authors:
Salla Multimäki
Paula Ahonen-Rainio

Keywords: map animation; temporal transformation; user testing

Abstract:
Animated maps are widely used in visualizing the temporal aspect of geographical data, even though their effectiveness depends on multiple factors and is far from obvious. This paper presents one method to complement map animations with a transformation that manipulates the temporal dimension. This temporal transformation, in which events were located equally into a time period, applies the idea of spatial transformation, which is familiar from cartography. We performed a user test with a transformed animation of two different datasets to demonstrate how the transformation presents different spatio-temporal relationships. The test indicates that the transformed animation can reveal spatio-temporal patterns which cannot be detected from a traditional animation, such as the order of very dense events. The users found the transformed animations insightful and useful. For complex visual analysis the combination of the transformed animation and timeline visualization seems to be the most effective.

Pages: 25 to 31

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: February 22, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-393X

ISBN: 978-1-61208-383-4

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from February 22, 2015 to February 27, 2015