Title: "Geovisual Interfaces for Regional Search and Exploration”
ABSTRACT
The most common and visible use of geographic information retrieval (GIR) today is the search for specific points of interest that serve an information need for places to visit. However, in several planning and decision making processes, the interest lies not in specific places, but rather in the makeup of geographic regions. This may be for tourist purposes, to find a new place to live during relocation planning, or to learn more about a city in general. Geospatial Web contains rich spatial information content about the geo-located facilities by means of ontologies, geoentities, spatial documents, events, georeferenced images, etc., that could characterize the atmosphere, composition, and spatial distribution of geographic regions. But the current means of Web-based GIR interfaces only support the sequential search, and limit the end users on abstracted view, analysis and comparison of urban areas. In this talk I focus on the need of sophisticated visual interfaces to enable end-users in discovering knowledge hidden in multi-dimensional geospatial databases. To tackle the human centered aspects we propose different heatmap based interactive interfaces to support multi-criteria visualizations in GIR, i.e., to facilitate the knowledge based exploration of urban areas. We particularity focus on regional search that abstracts from the places and instead generates the makeup of a region based on the criteria distribution and extracted keywords we find on the Web data sources of the region. We can then use this fingerprint to identify and compare other suitable regions which exhibit a similar fingerprint. The proposed interface allows the users to query and visualize the spatial summary of geographic regions and cities. The search experience is further enhanced via regional ranking and optimization methods to support the decision making of end users.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Chandan Kumar is an associate researcher and a PhD candidate at the Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems Group at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. His primary research interests include geographic information retrieval, Web mining, visualization and human computer interaction. He received his master’s degree in computer science and engineering from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India in 2009.
ABSTRACT
The most common and visible use of geographic information retrieval (GIR) today is the search for specific points of interest that serve an information need for places to visit. However, in several planning and decision making processes, the interest lies not in specific places, but rather in the makeup of geographic regions. This may be for tourist purposes, to find a new place to live during relocation planning, or to learn more about a city in general. Geospatial Web contains rich spatial information content about the geo-located facilities by means of ontologies, geoentities, spatial documents, events, georeferenced images, etc., that could characterize the atmosphere, composition, and spatial distribution of geographic regions. But the current means of Web-based GIR interfaces only support the sequential search, and limit the end users on abstracted view, analysis and comparison of urban areas. In this talk I focus on the need of sophisticated visual interfaces to enable end-users in discovering knowledge hidden in multi-dimensional geospatial databases. To tackle the human centered aspects we propose different heatmap based interactive interfaces to support multi-criteria visualizations in GIR, i.e., to facilitate the knowledge based exploration of urban areas. We particularity focus on regional search that abstracts from the places and instead generates the makeup of a region based on the criteria distribution and extracted keywords we find on the Web data sources of the region. We can then use this fingerprint to identify and compare other suitable regions which exhibit a similar fingerprint. The proposed interface allows the users to query and visualize the spatial summary of geographic regions and cities. The search experience is further enhanced via regional ranking and optimization methods to support the decision making of end users.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Chandan Kumar is an associate researcher and a PhD candidate at the Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems Group at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. His primary research interests include geographic information retrieval, Web mining, visualization and human computer interaction. He received his master’s degree in computer science and engineering from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India in 2009. 
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