Geoscience Reference
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(1) a model of information visualization techniques for 3D city models, and (2) an
initial version of a knowledge base that implements this model, represents a num-
ber of existing techniques, and provides tools for finding techniques and comput-
ing incompatibilities.
This chapter is organized as follows:
•
Section 2
presents a brief state of the art on the modelling of visualization tech-
niques. It covers the representation of the techniques themselves and the repre-
sentation of their evaluation.
•
Section 3
describes how we identified criteria that characterize information
visualization techniques by studying a corpus of scientific articles related to
visual applications of 3D city models. Then it presents a high level model for
the description of the techniques and their evaluation.
•
Section 4
presents the implementation of a knowledge base that represents visu-
alization techniques and incompatibility rules. The knowledge base is in fact an
OWL ontology that has been populated with 3D visualization techniques cur-
rently used in 3D city models or 3D GIS.
•
Section 5
is dedicated to the evaluation of the ontology, in particular of its effec-
tiveness. This has been done by (1) selecting techniques depending on differ-
ent criteria including task and context and (2) detecting visual incompatibilities
(and their cause) between techniques used together.
• In
Sect. 6
we propose future directions for the development and the use of the
knowledge base, by specifying an environment in which the users can try visu-
alization techniques on their own datasets and 3D scenes.
2 Background and Related Work
This section summarizes previous work that study and classify visualization tech-
niques. Important results on the evaluation of these techniques are also presented
since selecting an appropriate technique depends not only on the intrinsic charac-
teristics of the technique but also on their previous use and evaluation in different
contexts. Since ontologies play an important role in the classification of visualiza-
tion techniques and in the implementation of the proposed knowledge, this section
begins with a brief presentation of this topic.
2.1 Ontologies and Knowledge Bases
Many definitions have been published for defining ontologies in the context of
computer and information sciences. Gruber (
2009
) defines an ontology as “a set
of representational primitives with which to model a domain of knowledge or dis-
course. The representational primitives are typically classes (or sets), attributes
