Cartographic Representation of Spatiotemporal Phenomena

João Moura Pires (superv.), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, December 2013.

The field of geovisual analytics focuses on visualization techniques to analyze spatial data by enhancing human cognition. However, spatial data also has a temporal com- ponent that is practically disregarded when using conventional geovisual analytic tools. Some proposals have been made for techniques to analyze spatiotemporal data, but most were made for specific use cases, and are hard to abstract for other situations. There was a need to create a method to describe and compare the existing techniques.
A catalog that provides a clear description of a set of techniques that deal with spatiotemporal data is proposed. This allows the identification of the most useful techniques depending on the required criteria. The description of a technique in the catalog relies on the two frameworks proposed. The first framework is used for describing spatiotemporal datasets resorting to data scenarios, a class of datasets. Twenty three data scenarios are described using this framework. The second framework is used for describing analytical tasks on spatiotemporal data, nine different tasks are described using this framework.
Also, in this document, is the proposal of two new geovisual analytical techniques that can be applied to spatiotemporal data: the attenuation & accumulation map technique and the overlapping spatiotemporal windows technique. A prototype was developed that implements both techniques as a proof of concept.