Cartographic visualisation of human trajectory data: overview and　analysis

摘要

With the prevalence of mobile computing systems and location based services, largernamounts of spatio-temporal data are nowadays being collected, representing thernmobility of people performing various activities. However, despite the increasingrninterest in the exploration of these data, there are still open challenges in variousrnapplication contexts, e.g. related to visualisation and human–computer interaction. Inrnorder to support the extraction of useful and relevant information from the spatiotemporalrnand the thematic properties associated with human trajectories, it is crucialrnto develop and study adequate interactive visualisation techniques. In addition to thernproperties of the visualisations themselves, it is important to take into considerationrnthe types of information present within the data and, more importantly, the types ofrntasks that a user might need to consider in order to achieve a given goal. The understandingrnof these factors may, in turn, simplify the development and the assessmentrnof a given interactive visualisation. In this paper, we present and analyse the mostrnrelevant concepts associated to these topics. In particular, our analysis addresses thernmain properties associated with (human) trajectory data, the main types of visualisationrntasks/objectives that the users may require in order to analyse that data and thernhigh-level classes of techniques for visualising trajectory data. In addition, this paperrnalso presents an overview on a user study, conducted in function of this analysis, torncompare two classes of visualisation techniques, namely static maps and space-timerncubes, regarding their adequacy in helping users completing basic visualisation tasks.