Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Platform (RCP). Finally, recently there has been interest in component and bean tech-
nologies. For example, ILOG's Jviews (www.ilog.com/products/jviews/) uses Java, while
GeoWizard (Feldt
et al.
, 2005) uses Microsoft's .NET to provide geographical visualization
components.
3.5.1 Challenges for geovisualization tool developers
There are still many challenges faced by tool developers. First, it takes a lot of time and effort
to develop and maintain a tool, but toolkits such as InfoVis toolkit (Fekete, 2004), Prefuse
(http://prefuse.org/) and Piccolo (Bederson, Grosjean and Meyer, 2004) certainly aid the
developer. Utilizing Flash or SVG to quickly develop and disseminate prototypes is certainly
a promising strategy. These also permit the applications to be disseminated on the web,
which allows many remote users to operate them and try out the techniques. However, it is
still difficult to get the remote users to collaborate in an exploration. Current collaboration
techniques are not well integrated with modern CMV systems, and techniques to support
efficient and complex collaboration explorations are still naıve.
Finally, interoperability and extensibility still plague developers. Systems such as B orner
and Zhou's (2001) IVC certainly provide one method to integrate multiple algorithms
and techniques. However, interoperability and extensibility concepts should be included in
system development from the start of the project.
3.6 Conclusions
Many geovisualization tool developers seem to ignore or forget the richness of the pub-
lished research and implement only basic coordination, interaction and navigation effects.
Certainly developers and researchers have at their disposal a large heritage of geovisual-
ization techniques. Researchers have proposed many geovisualization forms, a multitude
of manipulation strategies and detailed aspects of coordination, brushing and navigation.
However, concepts such as handling missing data, visualizing uncertain values, coordina-
tion rudiments and interactive manipulation techniques need to be included in the systems
and included from the beginning of development. From experience, it is difficult to twist a
system to perform techniques that were not originally planned.
Exploration itself is still difficult. It is difficult to know where to go, where users have
been and how to control the interface effectively. One challenge is that either systems use a
replacement
strategy and the user fails to understand the history trail through the provided
linear history tree or the system provides a
replication
strategy and the user gets lost in an
explosion of windows. Thus, researchers should perform more research into how to manage
the user's exploration better.
Finally, the web certainly provides a convenient way to disseminate geovisualizations.
Consequently, the utilization of Flash and SVG seems promising and should be encouraged.
However, there is also a need to allow multiple users to collaborate in these visualization
sessions. Although some work has been done in collaboration, it remains a niche technique
and the functionality to appropriately manage and merge ideas from multiple participants
is still naıve.
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