Visualization and Hypermedia for Decision Making

Decision makers need access to heterogeneous, interdependent and meaningful information to obtain an understanding of the geospatial conditions for informed decision making and analysis of various options for situation assessment. Hypermedia concepts and visualization can facilitate the integration of large amounts of multi-source datasets and provide customized representations of filtered georeferenced data to enable the decision makers to explore and understand various spatial solutions without requiring advanced knowledge of geospatial technologies and systems. A specific application of decision making is the collaborative geospatial decision making, which is based on real-time data sharing, coordinated data access and synchronization between multiple geographically dispersed participants. The roles of hypermedia, visualization and geocollaboration are explored and case studies are presented to support decisions for city planning via interactive mapping, urban planning scenarios, and understanding urban sprawl over time. Two systems are discussed. The in-house developed Dynamic Visualization System (DVS), which dynamically hyperlinks to web map servers, and the GeoConference, a commercial real-time Internet-based geospatial collaborative conference system.