Creating Instruments for Ideation: Software Approaches to Geovisualization

During the last decade numerous geovisualization tools have been developed, many with highly interactive and manipulable interfaces. And yet we continue to build new tools using a range of technologies and techniques. Why do we invent new instruments? Or why do we need to invent new instruments? There are many possible motivations: 1) New technology continues to appear and it often enables us to do things that were not possible before. 2) We may be able to acquire data of new form or quality that cannot be analysed with existing tools as the data sets may be so large, dense or contain so many dimensions that no current tool supports interactive investigation effectively. 3) As geovisualization is used by a wider range of users, we encounter new tasks that cannot be performed using existing tools. 4) The particular needs of specific users (from this growing user base) are likely to vary. 5) Accessing expertise from different disciplines to our own might contribute to what already exists and enhance it further. 6) Collaboration between researchers may improve our ability to visualize geographic information and to develop the various instruments that support this process. The notion of interoperability underlies our efforts to develop and incorporate ideas and generate knowledge from our data using instruments for ideation. Ideation relates to the formation of ideas and concepts, the end goal of geovisualizers. Today there are many tools and techniques for creating instruments for ideation - sophisticated hardware, advanced programming languages, graphics libraries, visual programming systems and complex GUIs. In each, the developer or visualizer wishes to generate effective interactive graphic realizations of their data that are useful to them and/or their users. Indeed, these geovisualizers will come across many challenges. Above we suggested six factors that explain why new tools and techniques may be developed. In this chapter we expand upon these ideas and consider how each of these issues influence and shape the way we use and develop software for geovisualization.