Bruno Simões

Geospatial Visual Analytics

In the context of spatial planning, environmental management and monitoring a number of geospatial technologies allow operators and experts to capture, store, process and display an unprecedented amount of information about the environment and a wide variety of phenomena. However the extremely wide range of data available poses a critical challenge to operators that need to extract key pieces of knowledge from very large and heterogeneous sets of geospatial information. Within this scenario the domain of GeoVisual Analytics (GVA) can provide effective solutions to ensure better environmental control and to prevent environmental crisis. This paper presents the current challenges that GVA needs to face in the context of environmental protection, highlighting current technological, infrastructural, economical and legal implications at the international level. Finally the chapter shows how these issues have been tackled by the authors presenting the results of their current research activities.

C-space: Fostering new creative paradigms based on recording and sharing “casual” videos through the internet

A key theme in ubiquitous computing is to create smart environments in which there is seamless integration of people, information, and physical reality. In this manuscript, we describe a set of tools that facilitate the creation of such environments, e,g, a service to transform videos recorded with mobile devices into navigable 3D scenes, a service to compute and describe the emotional processes that occur during the user interaction with such content, a service that takes into account certain dynamic needs of users in personalizing solutions for allocating their leisure time and activities, a gamified crowdsourcing application, and a set of projection-based tools for creating and interacting with augmented environments. Ultimately, our objective is have a framework that seamless integrates all these components, to foster creativity processes.

Enterprise-level architecture for interactive web-based 3D visualization of geo-referenced repositories

Interoperability, interactivity and 3D visualization are three of the most important challenges related to Geographical Information Systems. In the last few years, research on interoperability has evolved from simple exchange of spatial data files, through the establishment of standardized spatial data repositories, to the first initiatives allowing management of semantic aspects of data. Interoperability has been mainly hampered by the need to agree on standards, and to develop appropriate tools and methods. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has proposed a number of standards with the intention of promoting interoperability through the use of open services such as Web Mapping Service (WMS), Web Processing Service (WPS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS). However, there are a number of open issues regarding interactivity, 3D data visualization, fault tolerance, scalability, server-independent implementation, delayed-time transactions, to name but a few, that clearly reflect the need for further study and discussion. This paper presents a service-oriented architecture in the context of interoperable Web 3D GIS applications, designed to support features such as manipulation, processing and visual analysis of geographical information.

Gamification as a Key Enabling Technology for Image Sensing and Content Tagging

The advent of mobile phone with a multi-megapixel camera and autouploaders has democratised photography. Taking pictures and acquiring annotations is no longer an expensive task as it used to be. Yet performing these tasks in a systematically way is still very cumbersome for most users. In this paper, we outline two game mechanics that can be exploited for the purpose of large-scale image sensing and content annotation. Our first mechanic allows for better control over when, how and where people should acquire images. The problem with existent image providers is that their services usually do not cover the entire area of interest, are inaccurate or very expensive. Our second mechanism aims at making the annotation of crowd-sourcing images more engaging. It leverage on large end-user communities to annotate images while avoiding the pitfall of using annotations that are meaningful only to domain experts. Annotations that are not relevant to users’ interests cannot be directly leveraged to enable search and discovery. A drawback of using crowdsourced annotations is that they have low agreement rates. Our approach aims at a finding a balanced agreement rate between pre-established annotations and those defined by users.

3DArcLens: Interactive Network Analysis on Geographic Surfaces

Geographic datasets such as international telecommunications traffic, financial flows, trading patterns, and national migration patterns describe the movement of entities between geographical locations. In spatial relations analyses the exact route of the connections is not important. Hence, one of the most preferred methods for its depiction is a graph representation with data nodes layered over a geographical surface (such as a flat map or a virtual globe). However, a large number of arcs can produce dense visual clutters that make difficult the extraction of information from: occluded geographical surfaces, occluded nodes and occluded arcs. In this work we present a novel focus+context technique for 3D virtual environments that interactively distorts and filters arcs layouts, revealing underneath information about the three aforementioned visual elements: nodes, arcs and geographical surface. Moreover, changing the camera does not affect the geographical focus of the lens. In our use cases, we observed that such technique is an advantage for tasks that include the exploration of geographical networks.

Creativity Support in Projection-Based Augmented Environments

A key theme in ubiquitous computing is to create easy-to-use smart environments in which there is a seamless integration of people, user experience, information, and physical reality. The next generation of ultra-portable handheld projectors is paving the way in this direction, as it develops to its pinnacle. When coupled with appropriate tracking technologies, this technology can extend user experience beyond the confines of the device itself to encompass the physical properties of environment. In this paper, we introduce a projection-based augmented reality framework that aims at facilitating the creation of augmented environments where digital content is snapped to objects around the user. We extend previous literature with a projection-oriented framework that leverages on handheld projectors to seamless combine physical interactions with projection-based content snapped to real objects, while solving inherent issues related to use of projective technology. To evaluate the relevance and impact of this study, we discuss a few application scenarios that are enabling this interaction paradigm.

Schematization of Clutter Reduction Techniques in Geographic Node-link Diagrams using Task-based Criteria.

Visual clutter is a hot topic in the domain of node-link diagrams as it negatively affects usability, aesthetics and data interpretation. The organization of items, i.e. the way nodes and links are positioned in the display, is one problem among many that leads to visual clutter. In previous work, different techniques were proposed to reduce the clutter that depends on the organization of nodes and links. However, a schematization of such techniques by task was never considered. Approaching the problem by task would be more efficient since visual clutter, by definition, depends on the task to be performed. In this paper, we propose a solution to visual clutter driven by the type of task. In particular, the aim of our work is to provide an answer to the following question: Given a task and a geographic node-link diagram, which are the appropriated techniques to reduce the visual clutter that depends on the spatial organization of nodes and links. In our solution, we have classified tasks into a limited number of task groups. For each tasks group, we have identified and analyzed issues leading to a performance degradation. The final outcome consists on a list of good candidate techniques for each task group. The selected techniques are the results of a survey that selects only approaches that act on the position of nodes and links.

Schematization of Node-Link Diagrams and Drawing Techniques for Geo-referenced Networks

Networks can be represented as node-link diagram. In geo-referenced networks, the used node-link diagram has nodes placed accordingly with geographical criteria. Different graph drawing techniques can be applied on such layout to improve their readability. This work proposes a systematization of node link layouts and graph drawing techniques. We use the proposed schematization to classify geographic node-link diagrams. A unified classification of layouts and drawing techniques has several advantages. On the developer perspective, the design of a specific layout is driven by the understanding of graph drawing techniques. On the user perspective, graph drawing techniques applied to improve the layout readability are specifically designed for a subset of layouts.

Interactive Access and Processing of Multispectral Imagery: The User in the Loop

Accessing and processing of multispectral imagery in an interactive way is essential to a number of operational scenarios. This paper illustrates their use in the context of forest management and planning, by presenting the results of a system that allows operators to access large repositories of geographical data, including multi-spectral imaging, and to process them in a very user friendly way. The project has seen the involvement of personnel from a local planning authority and it has provided the chance to confront with a number of issues related to today’s large availability of airborne and satellite data. This is challenging current technologies, creating a potential information overload. The paper will illustrate how the use of interactive 3D technologies to access and process multi-spectral data within a comprehensive framework capable to manage a large variety of different geographical information, can be beneficial to reduce access time to information and to improve the entire decision-making process.

Depiction of Multivariate Data Through Flow Maps

Flow maps are graphical representations that depict the movement of a geospatial phenomenon, e.g. migration and trade flows, from one location to another. These maps depict univariate spatial origin-destination datasets, with flows represented as lines and quantified by their width. One main feature of these maps is the aggregation of flows that share the same origin. Thus, visual clutter is reduced and the readability improved. This chapter describes a novel technique that extends flow maps to visualize multivariate geographical data. Instead of a univariate color scheme, we interpolate strategic color schemes to communicate multivariate quantitative information. Additionally, our approach crystallizes on augmenting flows with pie charts. To evaluate the relevance and impact of our approach, three case studies are presented.