TY - JOUR
T1 - Geovisual analytics to support crisis management
T2 - Information foraging for geo-historical context
AU - Tomaszewski, Brian
AU - MacEachren, Alan M.
N1 - Funding Information:
Since the CDA evaluation study, the CDA has been repurposed for use in disease dynamics analysis and was also re-purposed by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UN-OOSA) for use in assessing the effects of the 2007–2009 global economic crisis (GEC) on the vulnerability of impoverished people around the world. The CDA is well suited to support such an analysis given the complex, heterogeneous, abstract nature of large volumes of data related to poverty indicators such as multi-scale economic markets, social network support, health and well-being and livelihoods. Specially, CDA visual analytic concepts and software tools were expanded upon and used, in part, on a research project titled “A Visual Analytics Approach to Understanding Poverty Assessment through Disaster Impacts in Africa”, led by UN-OOSA and funded by the Rapid Impact and Vulnerability Analysis Fund of the UN Global Pulse initiative. The objectives of the UN-OOSA RIVAF project are: ,
PY - 2012/10
Y1 - 2012/10
N2 - Information foraging and sense-making with heterogeneous information are context-dependent activities. Thus visual analytics tools to support these activities must incorporate context. But, context is a difficult concept to define, model, and represent. Creating and representing context in support of visually-enabled reasoning about complex problems with complex information is a complementary but different challenge than that addressed in context-aware computing. In the latter, the goal is automated system adaptation to meet user application needs such as location-based services where information about the location, the user, and user goals filters what gets presented on a small mobile device. In contrast, for visual analytics-enabled information foraging and sense-making, the user generally takes an active role in foraging for the contextual information needed to support sense-making in relation to some multifaceted problem. In this paper, we address the challenges of constructing and representing context within visual interfaces that support analytic reasoning in crisis management and humanitarian relief. The challenges stem from the diverse forms of information that can provide context and difficulty in defining and operationalizing context itself. Here, we focus on document foraging to support construction of geographic and historical context for facilitating monitoring and sense-making. Specifically, we present the concept of geo-historical context and outline an empirical assessment of both the concept and its implementation in the Context Discovery Application (CDA), a web-based tool that supports document foraging and sense-making. We also discuss the CDA's transition into applied use for the United Nations to demonstrate the generality of underlying CDA concepts.
AB - Information foraging and sense-making with heterogeneous information are context-dependent activities. Thus visual analytics tools to support these activities must incorporate context. But, context is a difficult concept to define, model, and represent. Creating and representing context in support of visually-enabled reasoning about complex problems with complex information is a complementary but different challenge than that addressed in context-aware computing. In the latter, the goal is automated system adaptation to meet user application needs such as location-based services where information about the location, the user, and user goals filters what gets presented on a small mobile device. In contrast, for visual analytics-enabled information foraging and sense-making, the user generally takes an active role in foraging for the contextual information needed to support sense-making in relation to some multifaceted problem. In this paper, we address the challenges of constructing and representing context within visual interfaces that support analytic reasoning in crisis management and humanitarian relief. The challenges stem from the diverse forms of information that can provide context and difficulty in defining and operationalizing context itself. Here, we focus on document foraging to support construction of geographic and historical context for facilitating monitoring and sense-making. Specifically, we present the concept of geo-historical context and outline an empirical assessment of both the concept and its implementation in the Context Discovery Application (CDA), a web-based tool that supports document foraging and sense-making. We also discuss the CDA's transition into applied use for the United Nations to demonstrate the generality of underlying CDA concepts.
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U2 - 10.1177/1473871612456122
DO - 10.1177/1473871612456122
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84879379784
VL - 11
SP - 339
EP - 359
JO - Information Visualization
JF - Information Visualization
SN - 1473-8716
IS - 4
ER -