Database Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Visual Analytics of Movement: A
Rich Palette of Techniques to Enable
Understanding
Natalia Andrienko and Gennady Andrienko
8.1 Introduction
Visual analytics develops knowledge, methods, and technologies that exploit
and combine the strengths of human and electronic data processing (
Keim et al.
,
2008
). Technically, visual analytics combines interactive visual techniques
with algorithms for computational data analysis. The key role of the visual
techniques is to enable and promote
human understanding
of the data and
human reasoning
about the data, which are necessary, in particular, for choosing
appropriate computational methods and steering their work. Visual analytics
approaches are applied to data and problems for which there are (yet) no purely
automatic methods. By enabling human understanding, reasoning, and use of
prior knowledge and experiences, visual analytics can help the analyst to find
suitable methods for data analysis and problem solving, which, possibly, can
later be fully or partly automated. In this way, visual analytics can drive the
development and adaptation of computational analysis and learning algorithms.
Visualization is particularly essential for analyzing phenomena and processes
unfolding in geographical space. Since the heterogeneity of the space and the
variety of properties and relationships occurring in it cannot be adequately rep-
resented for fully automatic processing, exploration and analysis of geospatial
data and the derivation of knowledge from it needs to rely upon the human
analyst's sense of the space and place, tacit knowledge of their inherent proper-
ties and relationships, and space/place-related experiences. This applies, among
others, to movement data.
To support understanding and analysis of movement, visual analytics
researchers leverage the legacy of cartography, with its established techniques
for representing movements of tribes, armies, explorers, hurricanes, and so on;
time geography (a branch of human geography), with its revolutionary idea of
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