Presenting spatial information: granularity, relevance, and integration

Abstract

This volume collects the papers presented at the International Workshop Presenting Spatial Information: Granularity, Relevance, and Integration, held in conjunction with the Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT, on 21 September 2009 in Aber Wrac'h, France. These papers underwent a thorough peer review: The three papers by Howald, Harrie et al., and Wang & Schwering as full papers, and the two papers by Seifert & Richter and by Dahinden & Sester as abstracts.

In recent years, the availability of automatically generated spatial information of various kinds has developed dramatically. Nowadays, virtually any kind of information is obtainable via the Web. Route descriptions of diverse kinds can be obtained from many different sources and across different modalities. Views of maps and geographic information can be accessed in various ways, and local spatial or spatial-related information is provided for diverse interests and in a multitude of ways.

Although this is already a fantastic situation in terms of information availability and accessibility, Web users may not always be comfortable with the ways in which the information is presented. Recent research has shown that automatically generated information exhibits fundamentally different features from information provided naturally by humans when asked about spatial information, for example, in route directions. Therefore, it is our contention that substantial work still needs to be done in order to render spatial information services more supportive and cognitively suitable.

The workshop addressed issues pertaining to granularity, relevance, and integration. Spatial information is presented to information seekers on various levels of granularity, ranging from coarse high-level information concerning geographic areas to detailed low-level information concerning spatial actions in small-scale space. Not all of this information is relevant for all purposes, and so decisions concerning granularity are directly intertwined with issues of relevance across interaction scenarios. On top of that, web-based services typically present information on one level of granularity at a time, providing access to other granularities or other types of information via various hyperlinks. In contrast, humans manage to present information in an integrated and coherent way, switching flexibly and smoothly between levels of granularity according to the expected relevance for the information seeker. Such processes are substantially supported by dialogic interaction.

Each of the papers in this collection contributes to this research field in a different way. Blake Stephen Howald addresses the granularity structure of spatiotemporal information as presented in crime narratives. Tobias Dahinden and Monika Sester assess the relative importance or relevance of geocoded objects in terms of their frequency of mention in Wikipedia. Lars Harrie, Sebastien Mustiere, Heiner Stuckenschmidt and Hanna Stigmar discuss various ways in which the readability of maps presented in geoportals can be improved by automatic methods. Jia Wang and Angela Schwering discuss how automatic sketch map-based querying may be improved by taking systematic cognitive errors into account. Inessa Seifert and Kai-Florian Richter address how the sense of orientation of digital library users, when “navigating” in the virtual data space, can be supported by appropriate visualization. Together, these papers provide a broad and multifarious insight into ongoing research in the exciting area of spatial information presentation.