Visual Interactive Exploration of Geo-Located Infrastructure and Facilities in Urban Areas

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In many situations, citizens need to understand the availability of community services and local infrastructure in urban areas: Persons moving to a new area may want information about which place meets their individual demands; entrepreneurs need to understand the local potential of founding a new business in some area. While today citizens can access many different sources of information on the Web providing some kind of localized information about urban areas, including geographic information systems, e.g., Google Maps, traditional websites, e.g., statistical websites about air pollution in a certain area, or discussions on social networks (like Facebook) about the quality of live in certain districts of a city. Nevertheless, to gain insights from these information, they need to find the relevant sources of information, explore these sources individually, and then intellectually merge the results into a personal decision. Due to the amount, distribution and heterogeneity of available data, this process is tedious and time consuming for end users. In URBANEXPLORER, we are investigating methods for retrieving geo-spatially related information of different types and from different sources, integrating these into novel visualizations that are easily to interpret. Going beyond map-based points and region clusters, we will develop methods for the integration and intuitive visualization for relevant aspects of the geo-spatial availability of services and infrastructure such as spreading and distribution, sparseness and density, reachability and connectivity.