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

流程图是一种强大的工具，可以可视化许多不同变量的移动方向和数量，包括商品、服务、通勤人员、军队、鸟类迁徙、海上交通、电信交通和金融交易。虽然流程图是有用的、美观的通信工具，但几乎没有计算技术可以创建既清晰又易于阅读的流程图。这项研究项目将确定设计原则并开发算法，以促进创建具有曲线流线的易于阅读的流程图。设计一种创建流程图的计算技术，并将新技术作为开放源码软件分发，将增强用户创建有效和信息丰富的流程图的能力，这将提高特定用户和普通公众的地理素养。该项目将有助于开发可视化分析空间和时间上的各种运动数据的方法，这些数据往往是大量的。该项目将通过确定和阐明创建有效流动可视化的设计原则来促进制图理论和实践，并将为研究生和本科生提供跨学科的教育和培训机会。在这个项目的过程中开发的开源软件模块将使交互式和动画流程图比使用现有数字工具创建的流量表示更容易生成和解释。本研究项目将专注于具有曲线流线的起点-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方面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却很少受到关注。尽管流程图有着悠久的历史和美学品质，但关于流程图的有效设计，科学知识却很少。因此，研究人员将更好地理解流程图的传统设计原则的有效性，并将这些原则转化为创建起点-目的地流程图的计算技术。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。他们将确定被发现最相关和最有用的手动设计原则，并将这些原则转化为多标准成本函数，他们将使用启发式优化方法得出地图布局。由此产生的技术将在一项用户研究中得到验证，以评估效率和解释的准确性。

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.