A Visual Analytics Approach to Exploration of Large Amounts of Movement Data

Thanks to the recent progress in positioning and tracking technologies, data about various mobile objects or agents are currently collected in growing amounts. Analysis of such data can yield valuable knowledge about the movement behaviors of the objects and about the environment in which they move. Since movement data by themselves lack semantics (essentially, the records consist of coordinates and time stamps), their analysis requires the involvement of a human expert, who can interpret the data on the basis of his/her knowledge. This includes the general knowledge of the (geographic) space, time, and movement as well as territory- and domain-specific knowledge.