Producing Geo-historical Context from Implicit Sources: A Geovisual Analytics Approach

Abstract

Geo-historical context, or GHC, is a contextual setting based on the interconnectedness of phenomena, events, and place across multiple spatial and temporal scales. GHC allows for situations to be understood and reasoned with, often with aid of visual representations such as maps. This paper introduces a conceptual model of GHC that theoretically motivates a Geovisual Analytics application called the Context Discovery Application (CDA), which is also presented. The CDA is designed to aid in the production of geo-historical context by using computational processes to identify and extract potentially relevant context information from heterogeneous, implicit situation information. This information can then be explored through visual interfaces to help users explain and understand the information. A hypothetical humanitarian context analysis case study is used to show how the CDA can be applied to real world problems.

Keywords:

• GEO-HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• GEOVISUAL ANALYTICS
• OPEN-SOURCE INFORMATION
• GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
• CRISIS MANAGEMENT
• HUMANITARIAN INFORMATION