Is What You See, What You Get? Geospatial
Visualizations Address Scale and Usability
                                                AashishChaudhary and Jeff Baumes
resources翻译
Unlimited geospatial information now is at everyone’s fingertips with the proliferation of GPS-embedded mobile devices and large online geospatial databases. To fully understand these data and make wise decisions, more people are turning to informatics and geospatial visualization, which are used to solve many real-world problems.
 
To effectively gather information from data, it’s critical to address scalability and intuitive user interactions and visualizations. New geospatial analysis and visualization techniques are being used in fields such as video analysis for national defense, urban planning and hydrology.
Why Having Data Isn’t Good Enough Anymore
People are realizing that data are only useful if they can find the relevant pieces of data to make better decisions. This has broad applicability, from finding a movie to watch to elected officials deciding how much funding to allocate for an aging bridge. Information can easily be obtained, but how can it be sorted, organized, made sense of and acted on? The field of informatics solves this challenge by taking large amounts of data and processing them into meaningful, truthful insights.
In informatics, two main challenges arise when computers try to condense information down to meaningful concepts: disorganization and size. Some information is available in neat, organized tables, ready for users to pull out the needed pieces, but most is scattered across and hidden in news articles, blog posts and poorly organized lists. 
Researchers are feverishly working on new ways to retrieve key ideas and facts from these types of messy data sources. For example, services such as Google News use computers that constantly "read" news articles and posts worldwide, and then automatically rank them by popularity, group them by topic, or organize them based on what the computer thinks is i
mportant to viewers. Researchers at places such as the University of California, Irvine, and Sandia National Laboratories are investigating the next approaches to sort through large amounts of documents using powerful supercomputers.
The other obstacle is the sheer volume of data. It’s difficult to use informatics techniques that only work on data of limited size. Facebook, Google and Twitter have data centers that constantly process huge quantities of information to deliver timely and relevant information and advertisements to each person currently logged on..
Figure 1. A collection of videos are displayed without overlap (top). The outline color represents how close each video matches a query. An alternate view (bottom) places the videos on top of each other in a stack, showing only the strongest match result.
Informatics is a key tool, but it’s not enough to simply find these insights that explain the data. Geospatial visualization bridges the gap from computer number-crunching to human understanding. If informatics is compared to finding the paths in a forest, visualization is like creating a visual map of those paths so a person can navigate through the forest with e
ase.
Most people today are familiar with basic geospatial visualizations such as weather maps and Web sites for driving directions. The news media are starting to test more-complex geospatial visualizations such as online interactive maps to help navigate politicians’ stances on issues, exit polls and precinct reports during election times. People are just beginning to see the impact that well-designed geospatial visualizations have on their understanding of the world..
Geospatial Visualization in the Real World
People have been looking at data for decades, but the relevant information that accompanies the data has changed in recent years. In late 1999, Esri released a new software suite, ArcGIS, that could use data from various sources. ArcGIS provides an easy-to-use interface for visualizing 2-D and 3-D data in a geospatial context. In 2005, Google Earth launched and made geospatial visualization available to the general public. 
Geospatial visualization is becoming more significant and will continue to grow as it allows people to look at the totality of the data, not just one aspect. This enables better understanding and comprehension, because it puts the data in context with their surroundings. The following three cases demonstrate geospatial visualization use in real-world scenarios:

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