129.26.146.103: Visual Analytics & Spatial Decision Support: workshop at GIScience and special issue of IJGIS

2006-03-13T11:35:37Z

Visual Analytics & Spatial Decision Support: workshop at GIScience and special issue of IJGIS

New page

'''Visual Analytics & Spatial Decision Support'''

Call for papers for the Workshop on
Visual Analytics & Spatial Decision Support
at the GIScience conference (September 2006, Muenster)
and for a special issue of '''IJGIS'''
(International Journal of Geographical Information Science)

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers from relevant
fields to address research issues of visual analytics and spatial
decision support in the multidisciplinary context of GI Science.
The participants will present and discuss the state-of-the-art and
directions for future research. Extended papers (subject to formal
review) will be included in a special issue of International Journal
of Geographical Information Science reflecting the results of the
discussion.

Visual Analytics is defined as the science of analytical reasoning
facilitated by interactive visual interfaces (see
http://nvac.pnl.gov/agenda.stm ). People use visual analytics tools and
techniques to synthesize information and derive insights from massive,
dynamic, ambiguous, and often conflicting data; detect the expected
and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible, and
understandable assessments; and communicate assessment effectively for
action.

Spatial decision support means computerised assistance to people in
the development, evaluation and selection of proper policies, plans,
scenarios, projects or interventions where the problems have a
geographic or spatial component. This refers to both long-term
decision making (e.g. planning for sustainable places, mitigating
hazards, and infrastructure planning) and short-term time-critical
decisions such as emergency response and resource logistics. The
spatial (and often spatio-temporal) character makes such decision
problems challenging for people and demanding with respect to
technologies and tools.

The goal of the workshop is to bridge the several potential connection
points between research initiatives in visual analytics with the
complementary research on decision support in a spatial context.
Spatial decision making faces various decision complexities such as
- Spatial nature and temporal development of phenomena and processes;
- Complex multi-dimensional and heterogeneous data describing decision
situations;
- Large or even huge data sets that include data in numerical, map,
image, text, and other forms;
- Large number of available alternatives or a need to generate
decision alternatives ôon the flyö according to the changing situation;
- Multiple actors with different and often conflicting interests;
- Multiple categories of knowledge involved, including scientific
(expert) knowledge and nonscientific (layman) knowledge.

Visual analytics has a clear potential to help in handling these
complexities. Ongoing research efforts focus on such questions as:
- How to visualise data in a way that supports clear understanding of
the problem, finding reasonable ways to solve it, seeing pros and cons
of each possible solution, and understanding the tradeoffs between
various options;
- How to help users to understand and properly utilise sophisticated
interactive and dynamic visualisations;
- What other techniques and approaches could appropriately complement
the visualisation in helping people to investigate problem situations
and arrive at sound and well-grounded decisions;
- How to support knowledge and perspective sharing by teams and teams
of teams;
- How to externalise and manage the knowledge gained;
- How to support visual communication of analysis results, constructed
knowledge, and decisions made.

Respectively, the workshop will address various topics of visual
analytics and spatial decision support, including:
- Decision-centred visual analytics;
- Visualisation support for multi-criteria decision analysis and
optimization;
- Intelligent guidance in data analysis, problem solving, and decision
making;
- Collaborative visualisation & participatory spatial decision making;
- Visual support for individual and team analytical reasoning and
sense making;
- Methods to visualize and exploit heterogeneous information of varied
quality;
- Methods for capturing observations and findings in the course of
analysis, for documenting, organising, and navigating discoveries, and
for supporting knowledge construction;
- Visual analytics methods for spatial and temporal data;
- Synergy of visual and computational approaches;
- Visualisation support for spatial and spatio-temporal data mining
and statistics;
- Knowledge-based visualisation design;
- HCI issues of visualisation and decision support;

The workshop will have a multidisciplinary character with
participation by scientists working in the areas covered by the
workshop. In addition, we expect participants from neighbouring and
complementary disciplines (e.g. telecartography, geocomputation, HCI,
AI, cognitive science, information visualization, decision sciences)
to join the workshop for establishing dialog and future cooperation.
People working in application areas (e.g. disaster management,
business intelligence) are encouraged to attend the workshop.

The workshop will include two invited talks (to be given by Prof.
M.-J.Kraak and Prof. D.Keim), 6-8 long presentations, 6-8 short
presentations, and a panel discussion. Several slots will be reserved
for contributions from young scientists and PhD students. Potential
workshop participants are requested to submit working papers (4-6
pages length). The working papers will be selected by organizers based
on reviews provided by the workshop committee. Selection will be based
on relevance to workshop topics, scientific quality, originality and
innovation. The selected working papers will be posted on the workshop
Web site, with the goal to facilitate the interactive character of the
workshop. To promote exchange of ideas, a dedicated discussant will be
appointed for each working paper. Following the discussion at the
workshop, the best papers (after revision / extension and external
peer review) will be published in a special issue of IJGIS.

Workshop co-chairs and guest editors of the special issue:
ò Dr. Gennady Andrienko & Dr. Natalia Andrienko
(Fraunhofer Institute AIS, Germany):
http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/and
ò Prof. Piotr Jankowski (San Diego State University, USA):
http://geography.sdsu.edu/People/Faculty/jankowski.html
ò Prof. Alan MacEachren (Penn State University, USA):
http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/maceachren/

Dates and deadlines:

Deadline for working papers: 15 May 2006
Workshop paper notification: 1 July 2006
Workshop @ GIScience: 20 Sept 2006

Full papers submitted for the review: 1 Nov 2006
Full papers notification: 15 Dec 2006
Final paper submitted to the editors: 14 Jan 2007
Publication in IJGIS: early 2007

Workshop homepage: http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/and/VisA-SDS-2006

The workshop is supported by:
- ICA Commission on Visualization & Virtual Environments
http://kartoweb.itc.nl/icavis/index.html
- ICA Working group on Geospatial Analysis and Modelling
http://www.icaci.org
- EU-funded research project GeoPKDD ôGeographic Privacy-aware
Knowledge Discovery and Deliveryö
http://geopkdd.di.unipi.it/eu/

VisualAnalytics SDS 2006 - Revision history

129.26.146.103: Visual Analytics & Spatial Decision Support: workshop at GIScience and special issue of IJGIS