Understanding geospatial interests by visualizing map interaction behavior

We have developed a system which analyses how users behave when using a geospatial interface. Mouse movements and operations performed by users are assessed as a proxy to implicitly determine their interests, and personalise their spatial content accordingly. Users’ interface behaviour can be visualised to gain a better understanding of the correlation between their actions, intentions and interests. The focus of this paper is a visualisation tool, which is a component of our map personalisation system. This tool gives a visual depiction of users’ interactions with a spatial interface, and highlights the mapped objects upon which those interactions focus. Our motivation for this analysis is to help system designers discover hidden information about users’ intentions, and to use such information to improve map personalisation engines.