Geovisual Analytics and Storytelling Applied to a Flood Scenario

The large and ever-increasing amounts of multi-dimensional, multi-source, time-varying and geospatial digital information represent a major challenge for the analyst. The need to analyse and make decisions based on these information streams, often in time-critical situations, demands efficient, integrated and interactive tools that aid the user to explore, present, collaborate and communicate visually large information spaces. This approach has been encapsulated in the idea of Geovisual Analytics, an interdisciplinary field that facilitates analytical reasoning and decision making through integrated and highly interactive visual interfaces and creative visualization of complex and dynamic data. Geovisual analytics supports geo-information for emergency and early warning systems through a science that augments analysts and decision-makers capabilities to assimilate complex situations and reach informed decisions. In this context, we introduce a geovisual analytics system applied to a flood scenario. The system is aimed at supporting planners, policy makers and insurance companies to explore the data of a flood event, estimate the damage caused by the flood event to buildings and make plan for rescuing or evacuating people. The system is developed in close collaboration with our research partners and domain experts from SIM (http://www.sim.ul.pt/) and UNINOVA (http://www.uninova.pt/) and focus on the analytics reasoning aspects enabling analysts to explore spatial, temporal and multivariate data from multiple perspectives simultaneously using dynamically linked views, discover important relationships, share their incremental discoveries with colleagues and finally communicate selected relevant knowledge and publish early warnings if required. These discoveries often emerge through the collaboration between expert domains and operators with diverse backgrounds and are precious in a creative analytics reasoning process.