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

流图是一种强大的工具，可以将许多不同变量的运动方向和数量可视化，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。虽然流程图是有用且美观的沟通工具，但很少有计算技术可以创建既明确又易于阅读的流程图。该研究项目将确定设计原则并开发算法，以方便创建具有弯曲流线的易于阅读的流图。设计一种用于创建流程图的计算技术，并将这种新技术作为开源软件分发，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一般公众的地理素养。这个项目将有助于发展对空间和时间上的各种运动数据进行视觉分析的方法，这些数据往往是大量的。该项目将通过确定和阐明支撑有效流可视化创作的设计原则，为制图理论和实践做出贡献，并将为研究生和本科生提供跨学科的教育和培训机会。在此项目过程中开发的开源软件模块将使交互式和动画流图比使用当前数字工具创建的流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原点-目的地流图，其中原点和目的地位置对之间路径的特定几何形状是未知的或不重要的。在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，但是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审美品质，但关于流程图的有效设计的科学知识却很少。因此，研究人员将进一步了解传统流程图设计原则的有效性，并将这些原则转化为创建始发-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，以评估人工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工设计原则，并将其转换为多标准成本函数，他们将使用启发式优化方法推导出地图布局。由此产生的技术将在用户研究中进行验证，以评估效率和解释准确性。

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.