GeoVA(t) – Geospatial Visual Analytics: Focus on Time

On May 10, 11 on Guimaraes Portugal a workshop, GeoVA(t), was held in conjunction with the AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Sciences.

This workshop had 35 submissions evaluated by five workshop chairs. On the basis of the evaluation (two reviews per submission) 25 papers were accepted for presentation at the workshop. Among them, 16 were invited to be extended for the second round of reviewing for special issues of Int Journal GIScience and Journal of Location based Services.

The consensus of the discussion was that space/time/temporal analytics as indeed a core science enabling innovative visual analytics is not developed to the mature point and needs considerable research funding for the next decade.

There was some concern about he viability of the workshop given that the day before the local airports at Porto and Lisbon were closed and many flights were cancelled due to the volcanic ash in the air. However, 17 of the 25 accepted papers were presented with considerable interest and discussions over the course of 1.5 days. In addition we were able to have a remote capstone talk by Gennady Andrienko.

The first day was limited to 5 of the 9 papers. The extra time was taken by considerable questions and discussions. The second day started with a keynote talk provided by the “father of visual analytics”, Jim Thomas. This was well received with many questions and discussion. Jim discussed the core concepts, current state-of-the-art and research opportunities in Geospatial Visual Analytics.

The rest of the full day included presentations of the accepted papers from around the world. The time was fully booked by extending the presentation time slightly and allowing discussions. The interaction and positive exchange of ideas enabled a fine workshop. Towards the end of the second day we had over 50 people attending the workshop in the meeting room for our Capstone talk.

Click here for more information about the “GeoVA(t) – Geospatial Visual Analytics: Focus on Time” workshop.