IT Roadmap to a Geospatial Future (2003) / Chapter Skim
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4. Human Interaction with Geospatial Information
4. Human Interaction with Geospatial Information
Pages 73-104
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From page 73... ...
One focus of this chapter is how recent advances in visualization and virtual/augmented environment technologies can be extended to facilitate work with geospatial information. The chapter outlines the issues associated with interaction styles and devices ranging from high-density, large-screen displays and immersive virtual environments to mobile PDAs and wearable 73
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From page 74... ...
To date, most research on human interaction with geospatial data has roots in one of three domains: visualization (including computer graphics, cartography, information visualization, and exploratory data analysis) , human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work.
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From page 75... ...
The remainder of this section provides an overview of the current state of the art in three domains: visualization and virtual environments, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work. Visualization and Virtual Environments Developments in scientific visualization and virtual environments have been closely coupled with advances in computer graphics.
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From page 76... ...
Recent efforts have focused on linking geovisualization more effectively to computational methods for extracting patterns and relationships from complex geospatial data.3 Research in virtual environments, however, has emphasized support for human interaction, both with the display and with other human actors. A key objective has been the development of interaction methods that are more natural than using a keyboard or mouse and take advantage of three-dimensional, often stereoscopic displays.
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From page 77... ...
Although the new technologies pose an initial hurdle for users of geospatial applications, the fundamental challenge is how to support human interaction with the geospatial information itself. In other words, the challenge is in moving beyond HCI to human-information interaction.
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From page 78... ...
RESEARCH CHALLENGES This section considers the system and human-user components of four interrelated issues, each of which is central to human interaction with geospatial information: (1) taking full advantage of increasingly rich sources of geospatial data in support of both science and decision making, (2)
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From page 79... ...
methods and tools that support navigation of the ontologies created, explanation and demonstration of the resulting conceptual structures and complex transformation carried out on the highly processed data, and integration of the results directly into the scientific process (by providing standard ways to manipulate geospatial data across applications)
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From page 80... ...
Some research efforts have addressed the visualization of geospatial data quality and uncertainty (see Box 4.1 and Figure 4.1) , but existing methods do not scale well to data that are very large in volume or highly multivariate (a problem also identified in Chapter 3 in connection with current data mining approaches and geospatial algorithms)
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From page 81... ...
Geospatial Interaction Technologies Increases in data resolution, volume, and complexity i.e., the number of attributes collected for each place can overwhelm human capacities to process information using traditional visual display and interface devices. Recent advances in display and interaction technologies promise to enhance our ability to explore and utilize geospatial data from extremely large repositories.
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From page 82... ...
and geovisualization tools do not take effective advantage of human information processing capabilities, nor (as noted above) do they scale to analyses of very large or highly multivariate data sets.
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From page 83... ...
. Higher resolutions could give the needed detail, whereas large size would take the geographic context of problems into account more effectively (particularly in support of collaborative work)
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From page 84... ...
Possible alternatives would be to support human interaction with geospatial information from within a fully immersive virtual environment or to adopt a fish-tank metaphor, in which the information space is presented as a scale model manipulated from a perspective outside the virtual environment (see Box 4.2 for a discussion of one such effort and Figure 4.2 for an illustration)
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From page 85... ...
Although much of the work needed for urban geospatial applications centers on developing technologies suitable for acquiring, organizing, and managing these special types of information (see Box 4.3 and Figures 4.3 and 4.4) , research also is needed to address two human interaction problems.
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From page 86... ...
86 IT ROADMAP TO A GEOSPATIAL FUTURE and so on. Supporting this goal will require methods and technologies to fuse information about the external environment with information on the internal environment of constructed space information that, when available at all, currently is captured and stored in very different information systems and explored using different software tools.
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From page 87... ...
To support human interaction with urban geospatial
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From page 88... ...
88 IT ROADMAP TO A GEOSPATIAL FUTURE information in contexts such as dealing with a terrorist attack, an earthquake or hurricane, or a debilitating power outage, it will be necessary to integrate information updates on the fly.7 This will require new technologies for capturing change information at relevant time intervals or for recognizing change events, organizing and transmitting that information wherever it is needed, and facilitating user interactions with dynamic representations. 7For further discussion of research challenges in crisis management, see Information Technology Research for Crisis Management (CSTB, 1999~.
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From page 89... ...
HUMAN INTERACTION WITH GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION 89 Geospatial for Everyone Universal Access and Usability The preceding section described challenges in making very large geospatial information repositories productive for scientists, resource managers, and decision makers. As geodata become widely available, they will engender an even greater challenge.
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From page 90... ...
Expanding Geospatial Data Retrieval to New Audiences Enabling a wider range of users to retrieve geodata from repositories of growing size and complexity will require techniques that help users not just to formulate appropriate queries but also to determine what kinds of data are available in the first place. A goal is to help the user find the desired geospatial information (map, image, data, description)
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From page 91... ...
The location specifications inherent in geospatial data provide a natural organizing structure that may actually facilitate the implementation of such webs. How to generate comprehensive metadata that will be useful for general access and how to present them most effectively are open research questions, however, that call for test beds (as suggested in Chapter 2)
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From page 92... ...
This in turn raises concerns about how general audiences might be encouraged to utilize geospatial data safely and accurately. Research will be needed in techniques for supplementing geodata portrayals with metainformation such as how and why data were collected, uncertainty ratings, and caveats that addresses appropriate use.
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From page 93... ...
. Research investments will be required to develop empirical paradigms for studying the interaction of nonspecialists with dynamic, complex information from disparate, domain-specific sources.
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From page 94... ...
but focuses on two of the most intriguing aspects of ubiquity from the perspective of human users: facilitating the use of geospatial data from outside office or home settings and using geospatial information to enhance human perceptual capabilities. Mobile Access to Geospatial Information Underlying the goal of "geospatial everywhere" is the ability to obtain information on demand, wherever the user happens to be.
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From page 95... ...
Headsup displays, for instance, have been used to help jet-fighter pilots find their targets and to assist civilian drivers see objects in the road ahead when visibility is poor. Because mobile augmented reality requires both detailed geospatial databases describing the "fixed" world and location-aware computing support to match the location of the user with that description, it is a classic example of a spatiotemporal application of geospatial information.
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From page 97... ...
To make mobile augmented reality useful for emergency management, military deployment, and related rapid-response situations, systems must be able to cope with rapid changes, not only at the position of the observer but ongoing in the observer's environment. This means that information about the environment must be collected at sufficient spatial
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From page 98... ...
Understanding Collaborative Interactions with Geoinformation In spite of the large body of research in computer-supported collaborative work and HCI, we know relatively little about technology-enabled collaborative human interaction with geospatial information. A system
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From page 99... ...
Current HCI research on geospatial collaborative work centers on engineering goals that is, on how to make tools that function effectively in distributed or asynchronous environments. Research investments also are needed at the more fundamental level of design principles for geocollaboration that can generalize more readily to new collaborative contexts and technologies.
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From page 100... ...
An alternative solution would be to develop, from the ground up, methods and tools specifically intended to enable collaborative exploration of what-if scenarios. In either case, attention must be given not just to the technologies that support human interaction with dynamic geospatial models but also to interactions among team participants as they work with the models.
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From page 101... ...
The goal of teleimmersion is to provide natural virtual environments within which participants can meet and interact in complex ways. Because these environments become human-scale "spaces" and the collaboration often will deal with geographic-scale problems, a coordinated approach to human interaction with geoinformation and to teleimmersion is likely to have many payoffs.
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From page 102... ...
2001. "Collaborative Virtual Environments." Communications of the ACM, 44~7~:79-85.
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From page 103... ...
2001. "Worldlets: 3-D Thumbnails for Wayfinding in Large Virtual Worlds." Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 10(6)
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