Evaluating Geographic Visualization Tools and Learning about User Tasks

Complex goal and task definition in geographic visualization Computer environments for visual data exploration are commonly developed to investigate plausible scenarios or questions that prompt the discovery of relations or patterns that are useful. The goal of simultaneously representing data (geospatial or otherwise) in a number of graphical forms is typically to support a process of hypothesis formation and knowledge construction (Gahegan 2001). However, a clear definition of users’ goals and tasks that facilitates the evaluation of software tools or concepts is not always possible due to the exploratory nature of visualization. In addition, visualization techniques can be pertinent for a wide range of applications, users and data types. At present, this implies that evaluations must be custom tailored to each system and the domain dependent tasks it is designed to support, which makes the generalization of results about (geo)visualization techniques difficult in many cases.