Authors: Ferreira, L., Moreira, G., Hosseini, M., Lage, M., Ferreira, N., Miranda, F.

Publication: Computer Graphics 2024, Science Direct, Elsevier

Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the development of visual analytics systems dedicated to addressing urban issues. These systems distill intricate urban analysis workflows into intuitive, interactive visual representations and interfaces, enabling users to explore, understand, and derive insights from large and complex data, including street-level imagery, street networks, and building geometries. Developing urban visual analytics systems, however, is a challenging endeavor that requires considerable programming expertise and interaction between various multidisciplinary stakeholders. This situation often leads to monolithic and isolated prototypes that are hard to reproduce, combine, or extend. Concurrently, there has been an increase in the availability of general and urban-specific toolkits, frameworks, and authoring tools that are open source and abstract away the need to implement low-level visual analytics functionalities. This paper provides a hierarchical taxonomy of urban visual analytics systems to contextualize how they are usually designed, implemented, and evaluated. We develop this taxonomy across three distinct levels (i.e., dimensions, categories, and tags), juxtaposing visualization with analytics, data, and system dimensions. We then assess the extent to which current open-source toolkits, frameworks, and authoring tools can effectively support the development of components tailored to urban visual analytics, identifying their strengths and limitations in addressing the unique challenges posed by urban data. In doing so, we offer a roadmap that can guide the effective employment of existing resources and chart a pathway for developing and refining future systems.

Keywords: Visual Analytics, Visualization Toolkits, Visualization Grammars, Visualization Authoring, Urban Visual Analytics

Date: August 21, 2024

Document: View PDF

Related Entries

Directory:

• Gustavo Moreira
• Fabio Miranda
• Leonardo Ferreira

Events:

• Urban Visual Analytics Systems Research Published in Computer Graphics 2024 Journal

Related Categories

• Applications
• Data Science
• Urban Data Visualization
• User Groups
• Visual Analytics
• Visualization