Visualizing uncertainty for geographical information in the global terrorism database

摘要

Presenting information on a geopolitical map can offer powerful insight into a problem by leveraging an individual's innate capacity to discover patterns and to use map-related cues to incorporate pre-existing knowledge. This mode of presentation is not without its flaws, however, as the act of placing information at specific coordinates can imply a false sense of the data's geo-spatial certainty. Traditional uncertainty visualization techniques, such as those that change primitive attributes or employ animation, can create large amounts of clutter or actively distract when visualizing geo-spatially uncertain events within large datasets. To effectively identify geo-spatial trends within the Global Terrorism Database of the START Center, we have developed a novel usage of squarified treemaps that maintains the strengths of traditional map-viewing but incorporates some measure of data verity.