Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Analysis of Basic Relations Within Insights
of Spatio-Temporal Analysis
Andreas Hall and Paula Ahonen-Rainio
Introduction
Visual analytics (VA), defined as “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by
interactive visual interfaces” (Thomas and Cook
2005
, p. 4), can be seen as an effort
to combine human intelligence and computing in an optimal way and have two lines
of research: developing representations and tools that support human reasoning by
computational, visual, and interactive means, and studying human reasoning in its
interaction with VA tools. This research positions itself in the second line of
research and in the context of exploratory spatio-temporal analysis.
Spatio-temporal analysis operates in three dimensions, with spatial (geographic),
temporal, and thematic (attributive) components of data. The purpose of VA tools is
to facilitate insights by enabling the analyst to find the meaningful relations inside
and between these three dimensions. Of these dimensions, space and time are given
and governed by nature. They are predictable and invariant. The thematic dimen-
sion, on the other hand, is not predictable and its contents can vary infinitely,
depending on the data and purpose of the analysis.
The goal of this research is to gain a better understanding of the role that the
basic spatial and temporal relations play in the analytical reasoning process. The
research question is: How do the basic spatio-temporal relations translate into
human qualitative categorical reasoning? The hypothesis is that these relations,
being the invariants of spatio-temporal analysis, are of key importance to our
analytical reasoning. By gaining a better understanding of them and the role they
play in the reasoning process we can develop VA representations and tools that
better support the reasoning process of the analyst. The basic relations in space and
time are distance, direction, and topology. These cannot be broken down to simpler
