Research Associate
National Institute of Design,
Email: [email protected]
Scientific visualization is for observation, interpretation and explanation of raw datasets which has emerged as an effective way to explore graphic representation of data. When this concept of visualization deals with geographic data it becomes geovisualization. Geovisualization involves transferring the information about characteristics and nature of data to human brain by exciting the sensory system through the proper use of graphics. Hence to study the geospatial datasets in detail geovisualization is one of the ways.
Geovisualization has make room to represent the geospatial data through innovative scene construction which is essential to study the complex phenomena of natural and social sciences. It includes techniques of catography and geographic information science. Cartographic techniques and methods are mainly applied to translate the data into graphics, which include map like products (Kraak, 1998).
Traditional maps only display maps but interactive maps offer more exploration options. This concept is relevant for the representation of spatio-temporal data.
In the world many geographic data are dynamic in nature (e.g. weather data) and many users are interested to view the changes over time. The users not only want to view the changes but also to analyse the phenomena. For example,in the field of forestry a user would like to use the spatio temporal NDVI data for monitoring the vegetation growth, for understanding the phenological pattern of different vegetation species and to discriminate them, for calculation of biomass, to classify the land cover and to identify the cropping pattern etc.
In this case user may use different statistical operations for the analysis but numerous geovisualization techniques could be applied to explore the spatio-temporal characteristics. Such as linking between maps and databases, interactive manipulable maps etc. All these techniques helps users to explore and analyse the datasets with a definite process.
This calls for interaction with the data. Series of interactive static maps is one of the ways to visualize such changes, but in this case the sense of dynamics is very limited, it has to be constructed in the mind of the user. Animation seems to be a suitable technique to represent the dynamism. The study aims at integration of graphics with animation and, in effect, developing an effective tool for exploring spatio-temporal data.
