A Visual Analytics Approach to Exploration of Hotels in Overlaid Drive-Time Polygons of Attractions

摘要

Given multiple attractions to go to, choosing hotels is a Bichromatic Reverser k Nearest Neighbor searching problem. Many efforts have been made to address the problem in the domain of spatial databases. However, most of them suffer from the difficulty of visual selection and comparison. To integrate human intuition into the analysis process and facilitate information communication with users, geospatial visualization techniques have been developed. Unfortunately, too much information on the map, such as hotels and attractions, and drive-time polygons, could overwhelm users. Following the focus+context principle of information visualization, we propose a visual analytics approach to provide users with the flexibility of making their hotel choice. It consists of three main components: an overlap-free and space-efficient clustering algorithm to reduce the searching space for attractions in the map view (MapView), visual comparison of attraction-hotel drive-time in brush-able Small Multiples View (SMView), and the coordination between the two views. We demonstrate the utility of this approach and explain how MapView and SMView can help address the problem.