Visualizing and Interacting with Geospatial Networks: A Survey and Design Space

Abstract

This paper surveys visualization and interaction techniques for geospatial networks from a total of 95 papers. Geospatial networks are graphs where nodes and links can be associated with geographic locations. Examples can include social networks, trade and migration, as well as traffic and transport networks. Visualizing geospatial networks poses numerous challenges around the integration of both network and geographical information as well as additional information such as node and link attributes, time and uncertainty. Our overview analyses existing techniques along four dimensions: (i) the representation of geographical information, (ii) the representation of network information, (iii) the visual integration of both and (iv) the use of interaction. These four dimensions allow us to discuss techniques with respect to the trade-offs they make between showing information across all these dimensions and how they solve the problem of showing as much information as necessary while maintaining readability of the visualization. https:// geonetworks.github.io.

Revisiting the Design Patterns of Composite Visualizations

“…Other related studies may target specific data [10], [11], [12], tasks [5], [16], or layout [6]. Researchers have explored how to combine different visualizations to represent data with specific structures or types.…”

“…Second, from the perspective of spatial relations, how can different visualizations be composed together? Prior works [2], [10], [12] have summarized different design patterns for composite visualizations, but lacking quantitative analysis on how frequently different patterns are used [2]. In addition to the qualitative analysis, a demographic analysis will be helpful for spotting design trends, proposing design suggestions, and discovering the potential of under-explored design patterns.…”

GAN'SDA Wrap: Geographic And Network Structured Data on surfaces that Wrap around

“…Cartographers and mathematicians have devised hundreds of projection techniques [57]. The reason for this diversity is that none of these techniques can be considered optimal in depicting geographic information [55]. Rather, each projection is a trade-off between preserving shape, area, distance or direction [57] as it is not possible for a 2D projection to do all of these simultaneously.…”

Embodied gesture interaction for immersive maps

“…We chose to create an immersive flow map, because the visualization, analysis and interpretation of origin-destination flow datasets is often very difficult due to significant visual clutter caused by overlapping flows (Schöttler et al, 2021). Our immersive flow map is inspired by previous work on the three-dimensional visualization of origin-destination flows in virtual reality by Yang et al (2019), who visualized flows with three-dimensional curved tubes on flat maps and globes in virtual reality.…”

“…Whether our design is efficient and effective remains to be evaluated. Another interesting question relates to adjusting the display of flow lines to the current area of interest to reduce "visual clutter" (Schöttler et al, 2021). Visual clutter is a major issue for complex flow maps (and other network visualizations) and is often due to long flow lines crossing an area of interest: if the source and the destination of a flow line are invisible because they are located outside of a relatively small focus area, then the line does not convey any useful information and is nothing than distracting noise.…”