Visualization Support for Multi-criteria Decision Making in Geographic Information Retrieval

Abstract : The goal of geographic information retrieval (GIR) is to provide information about geo-entities to end-users and assist their spatial decision making. In the current means of GIR interfaces, users could easily visualize the geo-entities of interest on a map interface via sequential querying or browsing of individual categories. However, there are several decision making scenarios when the user needs to explore and investigate the geospatial database with multiple criteria of interests, which is not well supported by the sequential querying or browsing functionality of current GIR interfaces. There is a need for more sophisticated visual interfaces to enable end-users in discovering knowledge hidden in multi-dimensional geospatial databases. In this paper we discuss some of the HCI issues in realizing such multi-criteria decision making scenario based on the user requirement analysis. To tackle the human centered aspects we propose different heatmap based interfaces to support multi-criteria visualizations in GIR, i.e., to facilitate the knowledge based exploration of geospatial databases with less information overload.