FAIR geovisualizations: definitions, challenges, and the road ahead

ABSTRACT

The availability of open data and of tools to create visualizations on top of these open datasets have led to an ever-growing amount of geovisualizations on the Web. There is thus an increasing need for techniques to make geovisualizations FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. This article explores what it would mean for a geovisualization to be FAIR, presents relevant approaches to FAIR geovisualizations and lists open research questions on the road towards FAIR geovisualizations. The discussion is done using three complementary perspectives: the computer, which stores geovisualizations digitally; the analyst, who uses them for sensemaking; and the developer, who creates them. The framework for FAIR geovisualizations proposed, and the open questions identified are relevant to researchers working on findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable online visualizations of geographic information.

KEYWORDS:

• Geovisualization
• semantic interoperability
• software reuse
• FAIR principles

Acknowledgements

I thank several anonymous reviewers for their detailed and very insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. The icons in Figures 1 and 4 were taken from www.flaticon.com (designers: ‘Freepik’, ‘Kiranshastry’, ‘Nhor Phai’, ‘Pixel perfect’, and ‘srip’).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data and codes availability statement

The data that supports this work is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13635563. No software code was produced in the process of writing this article.

Notes

1. See examples of these maps in (Griffin 2020). For a non-exhaustive collection, see https://www.lrg.tum.de/lfk/service/online-maps-on-corona-covid-19/ (accessed: 12 March 2021).

2. All links were last accessed on 8 July 2021.

3. According to Yeates (2004), a thought experiment is a device with which one performs an intentional, structured process of intellectual deliberation in order to speculate about (i) potential antecedents for a designated consequent or (ii) potential consequents for a designated antecedent.

4. The scenario below is just one of many possible scenarios and is brought forward to advance the discussion on FAIR geovisualizations. Future work may come up with other equally interesting (if not more interesting) scenarios.

5. The informational and computational equivalence of these three forms are not discussed here.

6. https://opendatacommons.org/ (last accessed: 12 March 2021).

7. https://github.com/creativecommons/cc.licenserdf (last accessed: 12 March 2021).

8. See https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/mapzone/assets/doc/Explorer-25k-Legend-en.pdf (last accessed: 12 March 2021).

9. See https://github.com/nationalparkservice/symbol-library/ (last accessed: 12 March 2021).

10. See https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/TopographicMapSymbols/topomapsymbols.pdf (last accessed: 12 March 2021).

11. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SymbolsTab (last accessed: 12 March 2021).

12. E.g. https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=e739c503a1f04d38839834a0fe4ca6d4 (last accessed: Marc 12, 2021).

13. At the moment of this writing, TypeBrewer is undergoing an update, and is temporarily offline.

14. Tableau Public is sometimes classified as a shelf-configuration user interface (UI) rather than a template editor UI (see e.g. Grammel et al., 2013, Satyanarayan and Lee et al. 2020). Here, Tableau Public is mentioned as an example of template-based design software in reference to the ‘Show Me’feature that suggests meaningful charts during the visualization creation process.

15. See http://www.usixml.org/ (last accessed: 12 March 2021).

16. See the announcement about the collaboration at https://www.w3.org/2015/01/spatial.html.en, and the note at https://www.w3.org/TR/sdw-bp/ (both last accessed: 12 March 2021).

17. See https://maps4html.org/ (last accessed: 12 March 2021).

18. https://github.com/Maps4HTML/MapML-Proposal (last accessed: 12 March 2021).

19. https://www.tandfonline.com/.

20. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/.

21. https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm (last accessed: 23 July 2021).

22. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2016/2102/oj (last accessed: 23 July 2021).

23. There are many more dimensions of spatial querying not discussed here, e.g. objective (e.g. identify, compare), query formulation format (unstructured, formal, visual) and type of user interface feedback (lookup, filtering), see (Andrienko et al., 2003).

24. See (Lai and Degbelo 2021) for a recent example of work reporting promising results on semantic metadata generation for online maps.

25. www.purl.org.

26. https://dataverse.org/.

27. https://datacite.org/.

28. Interactive guidelines walk users through problem-solution patterns in an interactive manner, to transfer insights from the academic literature to non-experts (Trilles et al., 2020).

29. Thanks to one anonymous reviewer for pointing at Observable.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Auriol Degbelo

Auriol Degbelo is a Privatdozent at the University of Münster, Germany. His research interests include semantic integration of geospatial information, re-use of open government data, and interaction with geographic information. Past contributions of his work include a theory of spatial and temporal resolution of sensor observations, semantic APIs for the retrieval of open government data, and a semi-automatic approach for the creation of thematic web maps.