• RESEARCH MANDATE

• RESEARCH CHALLENGE

RESEARCH PROJECTS

Staff at the CSCA are involved in a number of projects focusing on geovisualization and decision support. The following links provide an overview of preliminary result from a number of on-going research projects.

• Visualizing Retail Hot Spots in Canada

• Data Visualization and Analysis of Commercial Activities

• Visualizing Retail Sales Change

• Business Geomatics Decision Support

• Geovisualization and Data Mining
  

RESEARCH MANDATE

Research at the CSCA aims to develop and examine the role of data geovisualization methods within business decision support activities. This will be achieved through the completion of the following objectives:

• The development of data visualization techniques for the analysis and display of business-related data, with particular emphasis on non-immersive dynamic representations of temporal data.

• The construction of a geovisualization decision support framework through the development of business applications to analyze spatial-temporal data, (visualization tools and methods).

• The development of methodologies to measure the effectiveness of data visualization within business decision making application, focusing on developing metrics to assess decision support effectiveness.

Faced with an explosion of transactional and operational data, businesses today face an enormous challenge: how to turn vast amounts of data into valuable insight and knowledge. Geovisualization (also referred to as visual data mining) is a process of selecting, exploring, and modeling large amounts of spatial data to uncover previously unknown patterns of data for competitive advantage. By applying visualizations and data mining techniques, businesses can fully exploit data warehouses and associated large-scale relational databases, to gain a greater understanding of the markets in which they operate. By reducing complexity, encouraging model interpretation, and easily depicting multi-dimensional data, the visual paradigm empowers decision makers and potentially reduces the time and effort required to gain valuable insight from reams of data. With large amounts of data collected by business it is now possible to shift away from a priori hypothetico-deductive forms of modeling toward inductive (or querying) approaches in which models are deciphered from the data themselves.

Visualization facilitates the development of dynamic interactive decision support tools that are a means for data exploration and provide immediate feedback to the decision-maker (user). As Slocum et al. (2001, p.17) note, 'developments in hardware and software have led to (and will continue to stimulate) novel methods for visualizing geospatial data'. For example, data animation can be used to depict trends and patterns by expressing how critical attributes change over key variables such as time and space. Geovisualization tools can also depict business data using 3D visualizations, enabling users to explore data interactively and discover meaningful new patterns quickly. Moreover, animated 3D landscapes take advantage of a human's ability to navigate in three-dimensional space, recognize patterns, track movement, and compare objects of different sizes and colors. Such, non-immersive dynamic representation of operational and consumer data has significant potential to enhance decision-support activities.

Research themes within the field of geovisualization can be subdivided into the following categories: