English

Visualizing and Interacting with Geospatial Networks: A Survey and Design Space

Human-Computer Interaction 2021-04-21 v2 Graphics

Abstract

This paper surveys visualization and interaction techniques for geospatial networks from a total of 95 papers. Geospatial networks are graphs where nodes and links can be associated with geographic locations. Examples can include social networks, trade and migration, as well as traffic and transport networks. Visualizing geospatial networks poses numerous challenges around the integration of both network and geographical information as well as additional information such as node and link attributes, time, and uncertainty. Our overview analyzes existing techniques along four dimensions: i) the representation of geographical information, ii) the representation of network information, iii) the visual integration of both, and iv) the use of interaction. These four dimensions allow us to discuss techniques with respect to the trade-offs they make between showing information across all these dimensions and how they solve the problem of showing as much information as necessary while maintaining readability of the visualization. https://geonetworks.github.io.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.06322,
  title  = {Visualizing and Interacting with Geospatial Networks: A Survey and Design Space},
  author = {Sarah Schöttler and Yalong Yang and Hanspeter Pfister and Benjamin Bach},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.06322},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

To be published in the Computer Graphics Forum (CGF) journal

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:13:09.221Z