Is What You See, What You Get? GeospatialVisualizations Address Scale and UsabilityAashishChaudhary and Jeff BaumesUnlimited 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 effec tively 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 AnymorePeople 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 important 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 vo lume 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 thevideos 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 ease.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 WorldPeople 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:1. Urban PlanningPlanners use geomodeling and geovisualization tools to explore possible scenarios and communicate their design decisions to team members or the general public. For example, urban planners may look at the presence of underground water and the terrain’s surrounding topology before deciding to build a new suburb. This is relevant for areas around Phoenix, for example, where underground water presence and proximity to a knoll or hill can determine the suitability of a location for construction.Figure 2. Videos from the same location are partially visible, resembling a stack of cards. Each video is outlined by the color representing the degree to which it matches the query.Looking at a 3-D model of a house with its surroundings gives a completely different perspective than just looking at the model of a house by itself. This also can help provide clear solutions to problems, such as changing the elevation of a building’s base to make it stand better.Urban planning is one of the emerging applications of computer-generated simulation. Cities’ rapid growth places a strain on natural resources that sustain growth. Water management, in particular, becomes a critical issue.The East Valley Water Forum is a regional cooperative of water providers east of Phoenix, and it’s designing a water-management plan for the next 100 years. Water resources in this region come from the Colorado River, the Salt River Project, groundwater, and other local and regional water resources. These resources are affected directly and indirectly by local and global factors such as population, weather, topography, etc.To best understand the relationship among water resources and various factors, the Arizona Department of Water Resources analyzes hydrologic data in the region using U.S. Geological Survey MODFLOW software, which simulates the status of underground water resources in the region. For better decision making and effective water management, a comprehensive scientific understanding of the inputs, outputs and uncertainties is needed. These uncertainties include local factors such as drought and urban growth.Looking at numbers or 2-D graphs to understand the complex relationship between input, output and other factors is insufficient in most cases. Integrating geospatial visualizations with MODFLOW simulations, for example, creates visuals that accurately represent the model inputs and outputs in ways that haven’t been previously presented.For such visualizations, two water surfaces are positioned side-by-side—coming from two different simulations—with contour lines drawn on top. In this early prototype, a simple solution—providing a geospatial plane that can be moved vertically—brings the dataset into a geospatial context. This plane includes a multi-resolution map with transparency. Because these water layers are drawn in geospatial coordinates, it matches exactly with the geospatial plane. This enables researchers to quickly see the water supplies of various locations.2. Image and Video AnalysisDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a program, Video and Image Retrieval nd Analysis Tool (VIRAT), for understanding large video collections. The project’s core requirement is to add video-analysis capabilities that perform the following:• Filter and prioritize massive amounts of archived and strea ming video based on events.• Present high-value intelligence content clearly and intuitively to video analysts.• Reduce analyst workload while increasing quality and accuracy of intelligence yield.Visualization is an integral component of the VIRAT system, which uses geospatial metadata and video descriptors to display results retrieved from a database.Analysts may want to look at retrieval result sets from a specific location or during a specific time range. The results are short clips containing the object of interest and its recent trajectory. By embedding these results in a larger spatiotemporal context, analysts can determine whether a retrieved result is important.3. Scientific VisualizationU.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ research organ ization, the Engineer Research and Development Center, is working to extend the functionality of the Computational Model Builder (CMB) environment in the area of simulation models for coastal systems, with an emphasis on the Chesapeake and Delaware bays.The CMB environment consists of a suite of applications that provide the capabilities necessary to define a model (consisting of geometry and attribute information) that’s suitable for hydrological simulation. Their simulations are used to determine the impact that environmental conditions, such as human activities, have on bodies of water.Figure 3. Google Earth was used to display Chesapeake Bay’s relative salt (top) and oxygen (bottom) content (higher concentrations in red).One goal is to visualize simulation data post-processed by CMB tools. Spatiotemporal information, for example, is included in oxygen content and salinity data. Drawing data in geospatial context lets users or analysts see which locations are near certain features, giving the data orientation and scale that can easily be understood. Figure 3 shows the oxygen and salt content of Chesapeake Bay, where red shows higher concentrations and blue shows lower concentrations.Moving ForwardVisualizations that can be understood at all levels will be key in politics, economics, national security, urban planning and countless other fields. As information becomes increasingly complex, it will be harder for computers to extract and display those insights in ways people can understand.More research must be done in new geospatial analysis and visualization capabilities before we drown in our own data. And it’s even more important to educate people in how to use and interpret the wealth of analysis tools already available, extending beyond the basic road map.High schools, colleges and the media should push the envelope with new types of visuals and animations that show data in richer ways. The price of explaining these new views will be repaid when audiences gain deeper insights into the real issues otherwise hidden by simple summaries. Progress isn’t limited by the volume of available information, but by the ability to consume it.翻译：你所看到的，你得到了什么？地理空间可视化的处理规模和可用性作者：AashishChaudhary和包密斯·杰夫无限的空间信息现在就在每个人的指尖，其与扩散的嵌入式GPS移动设备和大型网上地理空间数据库。