Visual decisions: Geovisualisation techniques within retail decision support

Abstract

Geovisualisation refers to an established area of research that provides the theory, methods and tools for visual exploration, analysis, synthesis and presentation of geospatial data. The aim of geovisualisation is to facilitate the knowledge-creation process by providing techniques and technologies that allow decision makers to interact visually with data by displaying the data in ways that promote visual-cognitive learning. The applications of geovisualisation within the retail industry are many and varied, for example, rendering complex retail demand surfaces (eg probabilistic trade areas) over time around a network of stores, sequencing changes in retail metrics (eg sales per square foot, profitability by store) and monitoring change in commercial structure (eg retail vacancy/turnover, new format retail development). To date, geographical information systems (GIS) technology in use within major retail organisations has relatively limited ‘visual’ capabilities, and finds dealing with temporal dimensions (ie the dimension upon which retail change occurs) particularly difficult. The increasing availability of time-series data within retail organisations provides many challenges and opportunities to the retail location analyst. It allows decision makers to move away from simply generating static ‘snapshots’ to undertaking ‘dynamic’ visualisation of change, for example, 3D animation of data sets over a number of time periods. This paper details the development of a prototype geovisualisation system that has been designed to enable geospatial visualisation of retail change. A number of potential application areas are examined. The paper concludes by highlighting the challenges that are faced in developing spatial–temporal visualisation systems and the potential to integrate such technology within retail decision support systems.