A comparative study of thematic mapping and scientific visualization

Thematic mapping and scientific visualization are two dedicated areas for visualizing a wide range of domain-specific data sets. From a general perspective, thematic mapping and scientific visualization reveal large overlaps in terms of visualization methods. However, these two disciplines are shaped by different driving forces and usage purposes. Accordingly, the concerns involved in the thematic mapping workflow that ranges from data source, data processing to map design principles may be quite different from those for scientific visualization and vice versa. Although some interdisciplinary researches between general mapping and scientific visualization have been conducted, little knowledge about the differences and commonalities between thematic mapping and scientific visualization is available. This research work is devoted to an in-depth comparative study with the aim to bridge these two disciplines by identifying their methodological strengths and synergetic effects. Comparison results show that thematic mapping goes steps further than scientific visualization in terms of data preprocessing, while scientific visualization relies more on the capability of users to visually process the data by themselves. We believe that scientific visualization can very well profit from thematic mapping methods to achieve some communication effects while thematic mapping can be very well extended to embrace some scientific visualization methods for the hotspot explorations.

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