Collaborative Research: Digital Generation and Cognitive Evaluation of Flow Maps for Movement Visualization

合作研究：运动可视化流程图的数字生成和认知评估

• 批准号: 1437292
• 负责人: Ian Muehlenhaus
• 金额: $ 8.07万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-01 至 2015-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1437292&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Digital; Generation; Cognitive

Flow maps are powerful tools for visualizing the direction and volume of movements for many different variables, including commodities, services, commuters, armies, bird migration, maritime traffic, telecommunications traffic, and financial transactions. Although flow maps are useful and aesthetically pleasing communication tools, few computational techniques exist for creating flow maps that are both explicit and easy to read. This research project will identify design principles and develop algorithms to facilitate the creation of easy-to-read flow maps with curved flow lines. The design of a computational technique for creating flow maps and the distribution of the new technique as open-source software will enhance capabilities for users to create effective and informative flow maps, which will increase the geographic literacy of specific users as well as the general public. This project will contribute to the development of methods for visual analysis of various types of movement data in space and time that often are voluminous. The project will contribute to cartographic theory and practice by ascertaining and articulating the design principles underpinning the creation of effective flow visualizations, and it will provide interdisciplinary education and training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. The open-source software modules to be developed during the course of this project will make interactive and animated flow maps easier to produce and interpret than flow representations created with current digital tools.This research project will concentrate on origin-destination flow maps with curved flow lines, where the specific geometry of the paths between pairs of origin and destination locations is either unknown or unimportant. Research in information visualization and graph drawing has resulted in techniques for creating flow diagrams, but the specific requirements for geospatial flow maps have received little attention. Despite the long history and aesthetic qualities of flow maps, there is little scientific knowledge concerning the effective design of flow maps. The investigators therefore will develop greater understanding of the effectiveness of traditional design principles for flow maps, and they will convert these principles into computational techniques for creating origin-destination flow maps. They will conduct content analyses and human-subject experiments for evaluating design techniques used in manually designed flow maps. They will identify the manual design principles that are found to be most relevant and useful and transform these into a multi-criteria cost function, and they will derive a map layout using heuristic optimization methods. The resulting techniques will be verified in a user study to assess efficiency and interpretation accurateness.

流动图是可视化许多不同变量的方向和流动量的强大工具，包括商品、服务、通勤者、军队、鸟类迁徙、海上交通、电信交通和金融交易。虽然流图是有用的和美观的通信工具，很少有计算技术存在创建流图，这是明确的，易于阅读。 这个研究项目将确定设计原则和开发算法，以促进创建易于阅读的曲线流线流图。 设计一种制作水流图的计算技术并将新技术作为开放源码软件分发，将提高用户制作有效和信息丰富的水流图的能力，从而提高特定用户和公众的地理知识。该项目将有助于制定各种方法，对往往数量庞大的各种时空移动数据进行直观分析。该项目将通过确定和阐明支持创建有效流动可视化的设计原则，为制图理论和实践做出贡献，并为研究生和本科生提供跨学科教育和培训机会。 在本项目过程中开发的开放源代码软件模块将使交互式和动画流程图比使用当前数字化工具创建的流程表示更容易生成和解释。本研究项目将集中于具有弯曲流线的起点-目的地流程图，其中起点和目的地位置对之间的路径的具体几何形状要么未知要么不重要。 信息可视化和图形绘制的研究已经产生了创建流程图的技术，但对地理空间流程图的具体要求很少受到关注。 尽管流图有着悠久的历史和美学品质，但关于流图的有效设计的科学知识很少。 因此，研究人员将开发更好的理解传统的设计原则的流量图的有效性，他们将这些原则转化为计算技术，创建起讫点流量图。 他们将进行内容分析和人体实验，以评估手动设计流程图中使用的设计技术。 他们将确定最相关和最有用的手动设计原则，并将其转换为多标准成本函数，并使用启发式优化方法导出地图布局。 所产生的技术将在用户研究中得到验证，以评估效率和解释准确性。