It is a delicate task to design suitable geovisualisations that allow users an efficient visual processing of the depicted geographic information. Today, such a design task is subject to three major challenges: the ever growing amount of geospatial data at various levels of detail, the diversified applications of that data, and the continuously expanding range of display sizes. In this work, the aim was to enhance the visualisation of relevant geographic information by focusing on utility and usability issues of designing geographic information representations. The relevance of information as an element of utility and its cognitively adequate visualisation as an element of usability was considered. To enhance utility, irrelevant data was separated from relevant data by implementing relevance as a filter and embodying relevance values as attributes of the selected objects. To represent these relevant objects and the context information design principles were formulated and a design methodology proposed that tends to facilitate a user's attentional capacities when processing geovisualisations. In order to design this attention-guiding geovisualisation, use was made of approaches and findings from relevance theory and cognitive psychology with emphasis on neuroscientific principles. A combination of relevance filtering and a cognitively adequate visualisation improved the overall usefulness of geovisualisations and made a substantial contribution to their practical acceptability. This interdisciplinary approach allowed a more precise and valid evaluation of geovisualisation designs.

It is a delicate task to design suitable geovisualisations that allow users an efficient visual processing of geographic information. In digital era, such a design task is confronted with a three-fold challenge: the ever growing amount of geospatial data at various granularity levels, the diversified applications and the continuously expanding range of display sizes. A geovisualisation system that strives for a high usability must satisfy the crucial prerequisite of immediately directing the user's gaze to the location of relevant geographic information and of easy decidability of the underlying semantic meanings. To this end, the cognitive skill of visual attention contributes to mnemonic and executive processes. Attention is indispensable for the visual selection. It facilitates the relevant information retrieval, processing and storage. On the basis of neurocognitive visual information processing, the paper addresses the interdisciplinary approach of attention-guiding design of geovisualisations with the intention to establish a taxonomy of scientifically testable variables. The authors try to relate attention-guiding attributes with graphical variables that cartographers apply to encode geographic information. The work is driven by the motivation to enhance the efficiency of geovisualisations and to enable a more precise neurocognition-based evaluation of geovisualisations.

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The availability of high resolution satellite imagery and the increasing amounts of geographic data collections enable exploring geographic phenomena on the base of highly detailed and dense information. Therefore suitable methods for explorative geovisualization (GeoVis) must be developed to emphasize relevant information in the data. This paper focuses on the development, implementation, and evaluation of attention-guiding visualization with respect to human cortical information processing and theories of relevance on maps of urban areas. The main value of exploring geospatial information is the ability to promptly locate patterns and easily decode the information in order to make inferences. These objectives are reflected in the basic factors of selective visual attention; i.e. the interaction of top-down factors (e.g. knowledge) and bottom-up factors (sensory stimulation). Attention guiding visualization is bottom-up oriented and focuses on the salient visualization of the location of relevant geospatial objects. Therefore, we propose the use of graphical variables that are solely based on perception-and relevance-oriented design principles. By computing saliency maps which spatially encode salient locations of our developed visualization we emphasize that our work is a substantial contribution to the enhancement of an exploration system's efficiency.

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