Multiple view geovisualisation of tourist activities in space and time at different scales

Abstract

This paper explores various ways to visualise the complexity of sentient movement, in this case the movement of tourists on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand. It argues that space, time and activity (s,t,a) are the three main dimensions of sentient movement, but activity is a privileged dimension when visualisation is required. Sentient beings have goals and desires, which can be realised through their environment and reflected in their activities as they move through and interact with the environment and other sentient beings. The purpose of this research is to find more powerful ways to visualise the movement of sentient entities of all kinds in a way that communicates aspects of process by the use of a combination of (s,t,a) and environmental data. Using tourist movement data as an example, this paper examines various generalisation approaches that emphasise different combinations of (s,t,a) dimensions in order to explore interactions between them. The complexity and richness of sentient movement data demands coordinated multiple view (CMV) visualisation techniques to draw together space, time and activity. New generalisation techniques such as ringmaps and sta-rods are utilised to fully integrate space, time and activity in CMV visualisations of tourist movements. The research reported here presents a prototype visualisation toolset, cal led RINGMAPS, which uses a GIS-enabled toolkit to visualise multiple patterns of sentient movement (individual or massive) in an integrated way at different scales for both animals and people. For this paper a tourist data set is explored in order to gain insights into the movements of tourists and to validate the visualisation techniques using a domain expert evaluation. Its results suggest that the toolset works well with tourist movements and that its CMV visualisations show integrated patterns of space, time and activity that encourage deeper insights.