GeoVA(t) – Geospatial Visual Analytics: Focus on Time

This issue has a specific focus on TIME. The research articles contributed here deal with the temporal nature of geospatial phenomena in novel and sophisticated ways in the context of geospatial visual analytics. The special issue originates from a workshop organized by the International Cartographic Association Commission on GeoVisualization (http:// geoanalytics.net) at the AGILE 2010 conference. Since the mid-1990s, the ICA commission has regularly coordinated research workshops and published the results of scientific endeavour in journal special issues and edited books that reflect the state of the art and the developing research agenda in geovisualization (MacEachren 1994, MacEachren and Kraak 1997, MacEachren and Kraak 2001, Dykes et al. 2005, Andrienko et al. 2007, Fabrikant and Lobben 2009). The rapid growth in the volumes of data that now require visual representation and analysis and the increasing complexity of the data and analytical problems associated with this activity have given rise to a new scientific discipline – Visual Analytics (Thomas and Cook 2005, Keim et al. 2008). The key idea of Visual Analytics, which is emerging rapidly and having impact across the sciences, is to integrate interactive visualization with efficient computation and database processing for effective problem solving that exploits and combines the strengths of human and computational data processing. These aims are in line with many of the research issues identified by the ICA Commission through its research efforts: the Research Challenges in Geovisualization collectively documented a decade ago (MacEachren and Kraak 2001) focussed specifically on Novel Graphical Representation (Fairbairn et al. 2001), Cognitive, Usability and Interface Issues (Cartwright et al. 2001, Slocum et al. 2001) and importantly in the context of Visual Analytics the Integration of Geographic Visualization with Knowledge Discovery in Databases and Geocomputation (Gahegan et al. 2001). The geovisualization community continues to work in these areas contributing to the new broader discipline by sharing knowledge and experience and considering the specifics and complexities of space and time and proposing appropriate solutions (Andrienko et al. 2008). Progress on spatial analysis and representation has been significant, as demonstrated by many of the contributions made in the publications listed above, and much of this work has contributed to Visual Analytics as it develops. But the complex temporal nature of phenomena has perhaps received less attention: hence the focus on ‘time’ at the GeoVA(t) workshop. We have close links with the Visual Analytics community and were lucky enough to welcome Jim Thomas to our workshop, which took place in Guimaraes, Portugal, in May 2010. Jim is considered to be the founding father of Visual Analytics and delivered a keynote presentation in which he acknowledged the advanced level of research achieved by the International Journal of Geographical Information Science Vol. 24, No. 10, October 2010, 1453–1457