Chapter 2 - Information Visualization: Scope, Techniques and Opportunities for Geovisualization

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of Information Visualization and visual data mining techniques and illustrates them using a few examples. The application of Information Visualization methods provides new ways of analyzing geospatial data. Exploring and analyzing the vast volumes of data has become increasingly difficult. Information visualization and visual data mining can help to deal with this flood of information. Visualization techniques have been developed over the last two decades to support the exploration of large data sets. Visual data exploration usually follows a three-step process: overview first, zoom and filter, and then details-on-demand. The advantage of visual data exploration is that the user is directly involved in the data mining process. Visualization technology may be used for all three steps of the data exploration process. Visualization techniques are useful for showing an overview of visualization and allowing the user to identify interesting subsets. In this step, it is important to keep the overview visualization while focusing on the subset using another visualization technique. An alternative is to distort the overview visualization to focus on the interesting subsets. This can be performed by dedicating a larger percentage of the display to the interesting subsets while decreasing screen utilization for uninteresting data.