1. Geovisualization for Constructing and Sharing Concepts Alan M. MacEachren, Mark Gahegan, & Bill Pike GeoVISTA Center Geography, Penn State maceachren@psu.edu www.geovista.psu.edu This work is supported by NSF (BCS-9978052, BCS-0113030, BCS-0219025) and the U.S. Geological Survey

2. Outline  introduction  background  HERO (human-environment regional observatory)  concepts and their visual representation  HERO geocollaboratory  visually-enabled concept building & sharing  discussion: where next www.geovista.psu.edu

3. Introduction  scientific knowledge  science is dynamic  scientific concepts change and evolve  concepts are situated … in place, in time, in tasks, in knowledge schemata, in paradigms  … thus, static concepts (and ontologies and knowledge maps) will produce static science  we need methods to support dynamic and situated concept development, sharing, and application  … our approach: visual representation, thinking, and collaboration methods

4. Background: HERO (human-environment regional observatory)  conceptual and technological infrastructure to support long-term study of local implications of global environmental change  one goal  support for defining and applying concepts

5. prototypical concept vulnerability as a flexible concept Adaptive Capacity Exposure Sensitivity Vulnerability Assessment method Vulnerability Sensitivity CSensitivity BSensitivity A Sensitivity C Vulnerability

6. Background: concepts and their visual representation/exploration  information visualization  representing and exploring hierarchies  depicting categorical information  diagrammatic reasoning  visual languages for group learning  spatial annotation for shared decisions  spatialization  exploratory geovisualization

7. representing/exploring concepts: InfoVis  representing and exploring hierarchies string theory landscape source: Chen and Kuljis, 2003 job vacancies by region source: Fluit, Sabou, van Harmelen, 2002

8. representing/exploring concepts: diagrams  visual languages for group learning input text a b c drawing Belvedere – Suthers, 1999 concepts principle theory hypothesis claim report unspecified relations supports explains and conflicts justifies undercuts

9.  visual languages for group learning  spatial annotation for shared decisions input text a b c drawing Belvedere – Suthers, 1999 concepts principle theory hypothesis claim report unspecified relations supports explains and conflicts justifies undercuts Argumentation maps: GIS-based discussion support for online planning Rinner, 2001 representing/exploring concepts: diagrams

10. representing/exploring concepts: spatialization source: Fabrikant & Skupin, in press

11. representing/exploring concepts: geovisualization link graph … dynamically linked to … map Clearfield

12. HERO geocollaboratory  collaboratory overview  electronic notebook/knowledge portal

13. HERO: geocollaboratory a collaboratory is a: “... center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform research without regard to geographical location – interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing infor- mation from digital libraries” Cerf, et. al, NRC, 1993

14. HERO: collaboratory supporting both synchronous and asynchronous joint work

15. HERO: collaboratory e-notebook

16. HERO: collaboratory what does a geographic e-notebook look like?

17. HERO: elements in knowledge portal Tools GeoVISTA Studio applets Web services Files Data Images Articles Tasks Experiment storyboards Workflow diagrams People Individual scientists Research groups Domain communities Concepts Hypotheses Categories

18. Visually-enabled concept building, sharing, and application  concepts to data and back again  visualizing structure in scientific discourse  concept graphing & acquisition

19. concepts to data and back again knowledge mgt for collaborative science instantiation  conceptualization representation capture comparison ontology description language meta-ontologies concept graphs web interface diagramming tools concept similarity measures workflow discovery exploratory visualization

20. concepts to data and back again what concepts do we already have?

21. concepts to data and back again what concepts will be in the data?

22. concepts to data and back again g b h a f c e ontological conceptualization exploration of data to be analyzed visual program of analysis sequence resulting map overlay operationalized concepts d

23. visualizing structure in discourse

24. Delphi discourse structure – concept development

25. visualizing structure in discourse demographics governance development climate trends Delphi discourse structure – semantic network

26. concept graphing interface to knowledge management ontologies  create from scratch  from existing ontologies  edit  browse

27. HERO: knowledge portal

29. CODEX: a prototype knowledge management system

30. Discussion  formalizing this approach  extend concept visualization  visual support for group thinking  empirical validation and extension through the HERO living laboratory

31. challenges for collaborative science infrastructure  supporting situated work practices  overcoming resistance to introspection  relaxing domain constraints