Luca Paolino

Framy-visualising geographic data on mobile interfaces

When using a mobile device for navigating and querying a map, some visualisation and usability problems may arise due to small screens and limited interaction modes allowed by such devices. Recently, researchers have devoted their efforts to overcome these issues by introducing innovative approaches for developing advanced interfaces, capable of providing users with analytical information as well as visual summary of data. In this article, we propose a new visualisation technique, named Framy, which exploits a novel interaction metaphor for picture frames to provide hints about off-screen objects. It was conceived to cover a wider range of spatial data visualisation tasks, which may simultaneously involve different geographic layers. The technique has been embedded inside a mobile GIS application, MapGIS, designed to perform typical GIS operations and queries on mobile devices. A usability study has been performed in order to verify the benefits in efficacy, efficiency and subjective satisfaction coming from the adoption of Framy within the system.

Investigative analysis across documents and drawings: visual analytics for archaeologists

With the invention and rapid improvement of data-capturing devices, such as satellite imagery and digital cameras, the information that archaeologists must manage in their everydays activities has rapidly grown in complexity and amount. In this work we present Indiana Finder, an interactive visualization system that supports archaeologists in the examination of large repositories of documents and drawings. In particular, the system provides visual analytic support for investigative analysis such as the interpretation of new archaeological findings, the detection of interpretation anomalies, and the discovery of new insights. We illustrate the potential of Indiana Finder in the context of the digital protection and conservation of rock art natural and cultural heritage sites. In this domain, Indiana Finder provides an integrated environment that archaeologists can exploit to investigate, discover, and learn from textual documents, pictures, and drawings related to rock carvings. This goal is accomplished through novel visualization methods including visual similarity ring charts that may help archaeologists in the hard task of dating a symbol in a rock engraving based on its shape and on the surrounding symbols.

Audio-Visual Information Clues about Geographic Data on Mobile Interfaces

The auditory channel represents a primary means of human interaction and several researches are meant to exploit this interaction modality in the design of usable interactive systems. The goal of our present research has been to exploit some interactive sonification capabilities and enhance the solely-visual version of Framy in order to convey the same information clues as those visualized on its interface. The basic version of Framy exploits a visual metaphor to provide hints about off-screen objects. Based on tactile input and non-speech sound output as alternative interaction modalities, the enhanced version of the resulting prototype is now capable to offer an appropriate tradeoff between a zoom level and the amount of information provided, and has motivated the design of multimodal interfaces that support ultimate users providing them with an additional means to access information.

Supporting the on-site emergency management through a visualisation technique for mobile devices

In case of emergency, visual analytics applications may be a successful means for quickly organising necessary activities. They allow decision-makers to immediately visualise the status of the crisis, plan the evacuation and address people towards vacancies in emergency centres. Although the effectiveness of such applications is immediately clear, further support may be gained by allowing people to directly manage the emergency on site. In this sense, it seems to be particularly desiderable to provide interfaces which support visual analytics tasks on small and handheld devices without losing their communicative efficacy. In this article, we adopt and extend a visualisation techinque, named Framy, specifically conceived for visualising in a very intuitive way a large number of aggregates on very small devices. In particular, we show how it reveals to be suitable for the management of these kinds of emergencies by embedding and qualitatively aggregating both spatial and temporal information useful for catching status and evolution of events. An example concerning an evacuation scenario shows the Framy extended capability.

The Tap and Slide Keyboard: A New Interaction Method for Mobile Device Text Entry

This article introduces a new soft keyboard, named Tap and Slide, specifically designed for mobile devices. The new interaction method, on which the keyboard is based, allows performing text entry operations in a very small space, so minimizing the space required. To evaluate the keyboard from a usability point of view, three studies were performed: the first verifies whether the subjects’ abilities expressed in terms of technological knowledge may specifically provide advantages in performing text entry operations, the second tries to understand the ease of learning of the keyboard considering both accuracy and efficiency in task execution, and the third analyzes the performance of the soft keyboard in comparison with the more common QWERTY soft keyboard.

Petroglyph Recognition Using Self-Organizing Maps and Fuzzy Visual Language Parsing

Petroglyphs are images carved into a rock surface by prehistoric people using a symbolic or ritual language. Although they constitute an historical patrimony of inestimable value, little efforts have been devoted to the development of automated tools for their classification and interpretation. In this work we present a new algorithm for recognizing petroglyphs within scenes composed of several engraved figures. The proposal combines an unsupervised recognizer, Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), with a fuzzy visual language parser. The first classifies the petroglyph symbols extracted from a scene by using Radon transform as shape descriptor. The latter exploits the archeological knowledge about recurring patterns within scenes to solve ambiguous interpretations. The algorithm has been evaluated on a set of 50 petroglyph scenes, containing about 500 carved symbols from Mount Bego rock art site, and achieved very promising results.

A spatial SQL extension for continuous field querying

In the last decade, a growing interest has been devoted to the management of data referring to geographic scenarios. However, the attention of recent research has been focused on discrete data disregarding continuous data, because of their intrinsic complexity. We introduce an extension of a spatial SQL, which provides users with the capability to pose queries about both discrete and continuous data.

A WebML-based Visual Language for the Development of Web GIS Applications

In the present paper, we propose a visual language meant to support the design of Web GIS applications. The proposal is based on the observation that Web GIS can be considered as a particular class of data- intensive Web applications, since they are mainly devoted to handle (spatial) information to and from the user. The success of WebML (Web Modeling Language) for designing traditional data-intensive Web applications suggested us to extend this visual formalism to model relevant interaction and navigation operations typical of Web GIS. The proposed extension consists of a set of content units specifically tailored for GIS concepts and tasks.Workspace awareness has emerged as a new coordination paradigm in configuration management, enabling early detection of potential conflicts by providing developers with information of relevant, parallel activities. The focus of our work is on detecting and mitigating direct and indirect conflicts by sharing information about ongoing code changes. In this paper, we discuss the results of user experiments designed as a broad and formative evaluation of workspace awareness, specifically focusing on whether users detect conflicts as they arise and act to mitigate potential problems. Our results confirm that workspace awareness promotes active self-coordination among users and can lead to an improved end-product in terms of the number of unresolved conflicts remaining in the code.

Monitoring Electromagnetic Pollution: A GIS-Based Visual Approach

In the last years, the attention of the public community on electro-magnetic pollution has continuously grown. In this paper we argue that the use of Geographic Information Systems in this domain should be encouraged as a valid support to the monitoring activities related to this phenomenon. In particular, our proposal of a visual environment, the Metaphor GIS Query Language is shown to provide a fruitful combination of GIS technology and visual languages, which have the double advantage of assisting electromagnetism experts in the measurement tasks, and facilitating non-expert users who might be interested in the level of EMF pollution in a given area.

Information Sharing Among Disaster Responders - An Interactive Spreadsheet-Based Collaboration Approach

Recent natural disasters have led crisis management organizations to revise their protocols so as to rely on the contribution of a wider range of actors, including simple citizens as well as expert operators, to support decision making activities. Reliable and timely information sharing among members of distributed teams of disaster responders has become paramount for the success of the overall crisis management process. In this paper we propose a crisis management system based on spreadsheet-mediated collaboration among on-site responders and decision makers. To share data a common spreadsheet artifact has been developed by using a participatory design approach which is accessed through mobile user interfaces. The evaluation results showed that the use of the spreadsheet artifact has resulted in more effective decision making relating to set of earthquake management scenarios in high-risk areas located in Italy.