The paper investigates whether the methods chosen for representing uncertain geographic information aids or impairs decision-making in the context of wildfire hazard. Through a series of three human subject experiments, utilizing 180 subjects and employing increasingly di cult tasks, this research evaluates the e↵ect of five di↵erent visualizations and a text based representation on decisionmaking under uncertainty. Our quantitative experiments focus specifically on the task of decision-making under uncertainty, rather than the task of reading levels of uncertainty from the map. To guard against the potential for generosity and risk seeking in decision-making under uncertainty, the experimental design uses performance-based incentives. The experiments showed that the choice of representation makes little di↵erence to performance in cases where subjects are allowed the time and focus to consider their decisions. However, with the increasing di culty of time pressure, subjects performed best using a spectral color hue-based representation, rather than more carefully designed cartographic representations. Text-based and simplified boundary encodings were amongst the worst performers. The results have implications for the performance of decision-making under uncertainty using static maps, especially in the stressful environments surrounding an emergency.

The explosion of map use in the past few decades as part of everyday activities, accelerated through the digital production and dissemination of maps and the availability of low-cost, location-aware devices, has made the job of cartographers and map display designers more challenging. Yet, how do these recent changes affect effective map design? Can we accurately predict which designs will work for a given context? We investigate the concepts of design transferability and context and their potential to help us create map design outcomes that are effective for varying map use situations. We then present a model for operationalizing map use context to support evaluating map design transferability and pose several open research questions that need to be answered to support operationalizing map use context. This is followed by a research agenda that identifies research opportunities related to key research needs that will underpin transferable map design. RÉSUMÉ

The use of bars to represent numeric values in desktop virtual environments that provide information in 3D through monocular depth cues is evaluated. Using empirical experiments we test hypotheses regarding the effectiveness of participants in judging the heights of different bar combinations in four different settings (static 2D and 3D desktop virtual environment with and without frames). The results show that the participants are highly successful in identifying the taller of two bars. However, there are significant differences between the static 2D and 3D desktop virtual environment settings in terms of accuracy and task completion times when comparing bars. Characteristics such as the participant's spatial abilities or the position of the bars in the landscape do not influence the effectiveness of the judgements in our study.

No abstract

Over four workshops, we collected community input on what people considered as persistent challenges in geovisualization with the participation of 72 experts from various sub-domains of geographic information science and technology. We categorize and analyze this bottom-up input, and contrast it with the previously published research challenges based on five research agenda papers (top-down). We observe certain overlaps but also some interesting differences between the top-down and bottomup approaches. A synthesis of the two suggests three major issues as persistent challenges: (1) a better understanding of the scope of our domain, how it interacts with other domains, and how to make this happen, (2) a systematic understanding of human factors, (3) a 'practicable' set of guidelines that matches the visualization types to task types, and guides the practitioner to design geovisualizations that are appropriate and helpful to the user. Distinguishing persistent from important, we discuss why the identified challenges are persistent, and draw recommendations for action based on our observations and interpretations. We believe these findings will help building a stronger, bettergrounded research agenda for our community. RÉSUMÉEn quatre ateliers, nous avons collecté des données auprès de 72 experts de différents domaines des sciences et technologies de l'information géographique sur ce qui est considéré comme des défis persistants en géovisualisation. Nous avons classé et analysé ces informations ascendantes (bottom-up) et les avons comparées aux défis de recherche précédemment publiés dans cinq papiers centrés sur les agendas de recherche et qui constituent notre référence descendante (top-down). Nous observons certains chevauchements mais aussi des différences intéressantes entre les approches ascendantes et descendantes. Une synthèse des deux suggère trois problèmes majeurs comme défis persistants : 1/ une meilleure compréhension de l'étendue de notre domaine, comment il interagit avec d'autres domaines et comment susciter ces interactions 2/ une compréhension systématique des facteurs ARTICLE HISTORY