GeoVis

One aspect of the IDIOM project is to develop and evaluate various visual interface approaches to access large data sets. You can find the more mature and tested ones on our portal Media Watch on Climate Change.

While the knowledge planet component using NASA World Wind is already online, we are working on similar interfaces to access and interact with other geospatial data. The following screenshots are made from prototypes using Processing, a Java based IDE and prototyping tool.

The first image shows the world's cities with a population of more than 1000 inhabitants. Cities with more than 5 million are labeled. Displaying cities as columns with their height corresponding to their population, addresses the problem of feature vs. population density discussed here. In combination with labeling megacities this emphasizes the more populated areas in Asia. The dataset is from geonames.org, a geographical database available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license.

The second image visualizes conversations of about 1500 users from microblogging service Twitter. The arcs link positions of people who talk to each other. The geocoding was done filtering location info from the users profile pages and looking it up again using the geonames.org API. Because twitter profiles store the location info in plain text and not in a structured or geocoded way, some arcs like the ones to West Africa or Antarctica are a result of the weakness of the geotagging component with some location strings.

Contact

Mag. Walter Rafelsberger, MODUL University Vienna
Department of New Media Technology, Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Vienna, Austria
walter.rafelsberger@modul.ac.at | www.modul.ac.at