O. Huisman

Developing a Geovisual Analytics Environment for Investigating Archaeological Events: Extending the Space–Time Cube

Over the past several decades, archaeologists have been developing and improving methods for collection, analysis, visualization, and modeling of site information. Despite the increasing capabilities of GIScience tools in recent years, archaeology is an application domain where these capabilities have not been fully utilized. This paper presents preliminary results on the development of geovisual analytics functions for archaeological investigation by extending Space–Time Cube (STC) software currently under development. Graph-theoretical techniques are implemented to uncover and visualize spatio-temporal relationships between artefacts from different historical periods excavated at different locations. These techniques are implemented and tested on a database of archaeological sites in Puerto Rico. The contribution of this research to visual analytics is the integration of space, time, and relationships within a single interactive environment. The extended STC facilitates insight into potential interactions or clashes among different cultures identified through archaeological digs. This is achieved through building linkages between database tuples based on attribute similarities which can be explicitly visualized and queried within the STC environment. The paper concludes with a summary of the effectiveness and potential of the prototype and its functionality.

Spatio‐temporal behaviour after an earthquake: a case study of Kawaguchi town, Japan

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a method to examine the differences in behaviour during a post‐quake period.Design/methodology/approach – Fieldwork and questionnaires were used to collect the households’ members’ movement behaviours after the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake. In total, three study areas were selected in Kawaguchi town (Niigata Prefecture) in order to enhance how the visualisation process can provide support in better understanding the behaviour during evacuation and recovery process. For this purpose the Space‐Time‐Cube (STC) was used to represent and analyse residents’ movement paths over time.Findings – Differences appear in the spatio‐temporal paths of the three study areas, implying a connection between the geographical location and movement patterns. The city centre shows disorganized Spatio‐Temporal‐Patterns (STPs) during the first week of the recovery process, eventually becoming organized after the rescuers’ arrival. Moving towards the isolated areas of the town, a progre...

Combining VGI with Viewsheds for Photo Tag Suggestion

In this research we attempt to develop an improved method for tagging of digital photos, making the tagging process simpler and more accurate for users, and thus ultimately increasing the quality of the VGI data as a whole. Our method combines Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in the form of tags on photo sharing websites (such as Flickr and Panoramio) with a visibility analysis of the new photo to be tagged. This analysis is performed by combining the photo metadata with a Digital Surface Model and building footprints. This approach is used to derive a ranked set of suggestions for a given photograph. To deploy the system, a webservice was implemented.