A chorem-based approach for visually synthesizing complex phenomena

Abstract

When dealing with scenarios referring to complex issues, such as political, economic and demographic problems, the usage of visual metaphors represents a more effective approach in supporting users to locate facts and new patterns. In this paper, we describe a research project whose aim is to investigate a cartographic solution able to represent dynamics, movements and changes that underlie possible problems. The solution we propose is based on the chorem concept. It represents an immediate synthesis of data of interest, and provides expert users with both a global view of objects and phenomena, and an insight into a specific issue. Based on preliminaries studies, we first provide a formal definition and classification of chorems in terms of structure and meaning, meant to homogenize chorem construction and usage. Then, a system to generate chorematic maps from available data sets is described and an XML-like language, named ChorML is specified, enabling system modules communication. In order to validate our approach, we exemplify the construction of a chorematic map, which depicts the most significant flows of migrating population in Italy in 2000. Such a synthesis may represent the starting point for further processing tasks aimed to derive spatial analysis data, as well as to support expert users in decision making

The State of the Art in Map‐Like Visualization

“…Del Fatto et al . [DFLL*08] investigate the incremental application of so‐called chorems to the outlines of geographic regions in order to generalize their shape. Chorems describe geometric transformations that can be applied to the outline of a shape in order to schematize it.…”

Multi-agent system approach for improved real-time visual summaries of geographical data streams

“…By putting the user's attention on important features such as patterns, trends, dependencies and outliers (Rinzivillo et al, 2008). Such spatial curiosity led directly to new ideas and other geovisualisation methods emerged known as 'visual summaries' (De Chiara et al, 2011;Del Fatto et al, 2008) of datasets that will help an analyst to find what is the more important out of the mass of available information, and to answer questions quickly and efficiently. Visual summaries of geographic data can be the results of both semantic and geometric generalisations.…”

“…The main advantage of chorems is to facilitate the comparison of spatial systems thanks to a simple representation of complex organisations. In addition, in the IT community, chorems also are used both in terms of applications and semantics as they are extensively discussed in Del Fatto et al (2008) where the authors provide a thorough study about the history of chorems usage, from Brunet's definition to recent applications (De Chiara et al, 2011). In Klippel et al (2005), authors propose chorems that can help in presenting highly generalised route information to better model human navigation, they uses the term 'wayfinding chorems' (called chorems by the authors) as established by Klippel and is inspired by but does not work with Brunet's chorems.…”

“…In parallel with this effervescence, recent results have demonstrated that chorems can be used to both catch a thematic global view of a territory and its phenomena and investigate complex spatial phenomena by accessing data characterising them (De Chiara et al, 2011;Del Fatto et al, 2008;Klippel et al, 2005). A chorem is a schematised spatial representation, which eliminates any detail unnecessary to the map comprehension (Brunet, 1986).…”

Monitoring Urban Happiness through Interactive Chorems

“…To achieve this goal, the authors propose that visual representation based on chorems be adopted, which produces visual syntheses of territorial scenarios that are appropriate to perform an analysis and are simple to understand despite the large amount of data and the limitations of the map [4][5][6][7].…”