Chapter 36 – Advancing Geovisualization

Publisher Summary This chapter identifies a number of themes, issues, and tensions that permeate through the contributions presented in the book. A final issue relates to whether geovisualization developments are motivated by known requirements, the need for solutions or developing possibilities, and the desire to explore and apply them. This can be considered as a tension among approaches that are initiated by a user's needs and technological opportunities and draws attention to the geovisualization research initiated by “demand” as opposed to “supply.” Tensions occur when prototypes that are effective for testing and presenting ideas and that may be deployable in specific situations (perhaps by their developers) are far from easy to use in an applied and systematic manner by a wider range of users. Whilst elegant software design and increasing levels of interoperability mean that the boundaries between “developer” and “user” are narrowing in a field in which tasks are often difficult to define, predict, or constrain, the user-centered approach and techniques that it encompasses offer an important opportunity for addressing this tension by bridging the gap between developers and users..