North-East Visualization & Analytics Center, Pennsylvania State University

HEALTH GeoJunction: HEALTH GeoJunction is a geovisual analytics enabled web portal that provides: (a) web services that use computational reasoning methods to extract place-time-concept information from text and metadata data for documents and (b) visually-enabled place-time-concept query, filtering, and contextualizing tools that apply to both the documents and their extracted content. The web interface provides maps, time series plots, and concept views to support analysts in the task of quickly finding scientific and other publications that are relevant not only to a particular topic, but also to particular places and times.

In the example at right, the analyst has started with about 4000 documents on avian influenza retrieved from PubMed and drilled down quickly (using a visual interface to place, time, and concept filters) to find the recent documents associated with disease outbreaks in Indonesia.

ConceptVista: ConceptVista supports the visualization, manipulation and management of knowledge. Formal knowledge is represented as ontologies and can be related to both raw data and tacit knowledge (represented in concept maps). ConceptVista also enables comparison of perspectives.

GeoViz Toolkit: The GeoViz Toolkit allows analysts to mix and match data visualization and spatial analysis components to quickly construct custom analysis tools. Components are automatically coordinated across multiple dynamically-linked views to enable insight into highly multivariate data, especially geographically organized data, such as tabular data by country, state, or city.

Crime in PA: The map below depicts joint 2001 and 2002 larceny in PA – light, medium, and dark gray represent low, medium, and high rates both years respectively; purples indicate rates higher in 2002 than 2001 (an increase) and greens the opposite (a decrease).

By double-clicking on Burks Co. near Philadelphia, the analyst has generated a computational multivariate analysis to identify the counties with similar 3-category, 2-year crime statistics. The resulting link graph (upper left) shows that York, Montgomery, Butler, Washington, and Centre Counties are the most similar – all have high larceny rates in both years and low to middle burglary rates. A click on Butler in the link graph highlights similar counties on the map (others are faded out). A parallel coordinate plot (bottom) shows the county rate distribution for robbery, burglary,

Improvise: Improvise is a desktop application for building and browsing a wide range of flexible and powerful visual analysis tools. Live design of visual queries facilitates fast and flexible interactive drill-down into fine-grain relationships buried in spatiotemporal and social network information spread across multiple data sets. Coordinating queries across multiple views provides analysts with the means to seek out and dissect subtle patterns in complex information spaces. The example below shows an interactive+animated visualization of a simulated evacuation from a health clinic. The interface enables analysis of the movements of people (yellow circles) not only in space and time but also in terms of motion behaviors suggested by speed, direction, and curviness of paths through rooms, hallways, and parking lots. Individuals can be selected (red circles/paths) based on particular motion characteristics at specific times, then observed in their earlier or later movement behaviors relative to those of other persons. Here, the visualization reveals several persons exhibiting unusually fast or erratic movement prior to a facility-wide evacuation event.

Perspective filtering: Two simple perspectives, about chemical weapons and biological weapons, are created to query the OpenCyc ontology. Resulting concepts are aggregated in colored “clouds”, and can be connected to Web resources and search engines.

GeoDiscoverer: GeoDiscoverer supports combination and integration of social network discovery techniques with geographic information retrieval, indexing and visualization techniques to enable analysts to discover

and explore significant and novel social connections and their geographic patterns in web documents or other text sources.

GeoVisual Analytics: leveraging the ‘geo’ in information to support information foraging, heterogeneous information integration, analytical reasoning & sense-making, knowledge construction & management, and decision-making to address any problem in which place is the object of attention or point of connection.

and larceny in each year, with values for Butler County highlighted due to its selection on the link graph.

GeoVisual Analytics: Extracting, Contextualizing, and Interpreting Information(geo) Building and Managing Knowledge(geo)