Geovisualization and Geostatistics: A Concept for the Numerical and Visual Analysis of Geographic Mass Data

Abstract

Scientific visualization as an interdisciplinary research field offers a wide range of methods and techniques to efficiently analyze and visualize the spatial and temporal data and information. In this article a discipline of scientific visualization is needed to explore information and construct knowledge from geodata: geovisualization. This research field offers tools and techniques to discover relationships, clusters and trends in geodata. Adapting methods from computer science and geographic knowledge discovery spatial and spatiotemporal data-patterns and information can be visualized in different types of charts, plots and combined with elements of cartography.

This article presents selected methods and techniques for two different scientific tasks: (1) To detect spatial attribute relationships of a landform linked to map. Specifically: spatial relationships of size, shape and location of thermokarst lakes, formed through permafrost degradation. We used star charts to visualize multivariable data and to make visible how landforms attributes are relate to each other. (2) A concept is developed to visually explore the specific distribution of emergency services and service clusters due to space and time. It depends on the example of emergency services of the City of Cologne. This geodata set contains more than 500,000 emergency services beginning 01/2007 and ending in 08/2011. The concept’s core is a new hierarchical data representation based on tree diagrams linked with a cartographic visualization of the results received from explorative statistics (e.g., kernel density estimation).