Best Practices For Gis Data Visualization And Communication

Understanding User Needs

Analyzing the target audience and goals for a GIS data visualization or communication product is key to creating something usable and effective. Start by identifying the personas who will utilize the maps, apps, dashboards etc. Describe their roles, domain knowledge, technical skills and define their specific tasks and informational needs. Gather requirements through stakeholder interviews, observation of work practices and reviews of existing tools. Document user stories to capture essential functional elements from their perspective. Always focus on the key details they need to make decisions instead of just displaying all possible attributes. Evaluate workflows to optimize focus and simplicity.

Analyzing target audience and goals

Defining the end-user early is vital to building intuitive GIS visualizations. For each primary persona, enumerate their responsibilities, specialized vocabulary, geographic and data expertise. Outline their individual objectives and how they apply location-based information. This concentrates efforts on relevant variables and suitable representations. Avoid overload by determining must-have components upfront based on their actual usage context.

Crafting personas and user stories

Construct fictional biographies of major user types to guide development priorities. Assemble details around their education, duties, skills, motivations and personal background. User stories tell implementation scenarios from their view, structured as “As a ____ I want _____ so that ____.” This grounds visions in practical use cases and constraints. Prioritize stories delivering high value for the role. Revisit and revise narratives as understanding evolves, ensuring the cast and plot mirrors the real world.

Defining key tasks and required information

The specific work performed with location-based data determines critical system capabilities. Catalog usage modes like identifying map coordinates, analyzing trends, generating travel directions or displaying real-time sensor network status. Be exhaustive then rank frequency and difficulty to identify primary interactions. These essential practices should smoothly integrate the spatial facts necessary to complete them. Mandatory attributes differ across functions so avoid arbitrarily including fields without purpose. Isolating key tasks and requisite information prevents function bloat and overcomplication.

Optimizing Visual Display

GIS data visualization requires balancing complete spatial representation with simplified legible symbology. The appropriate map projection preserves characteristic shapes for the target region’s extent. Meaningful legends build innate comprehension of employed symbols while scale bars provide critical geographic context. Colors follow accepted conventions around paired variables facilitating preattentive cognition. Finally, labeling retains expressiveness through conflict avoidance by prioritizing heavily trafficked and disambiguating features.

Choosing intuitive map projections

No singular projection can perfectly portray the globe without distortions, so pick based on spatial properties to preserve. Conformal projections maintain angles and shapes locally, useful for navigation charts. Equal-area projections represent size accurately helping quantify phenomena. Compromise options strike a balance or optimize a region like contiguous Albers in the US. Designate appropriate parameters and document choices through insets or legends so users can contextualize view artifacts.

Designing clear legends and scale bars

Legends build intuition around spatial representations relating real-world entities to geometric symbols. Order legend items from most to least predominant matching visual hierarchy. Right-size symbols and annotate meanings while conveying variability through multiple scaled items. Locate legends outside of high detail areas and allow interactivity for toggling categories. Scale bars give tangible distancecontext through changing ratio-representative increments. Remember to adjust language, color and sizing choices for accessibility standards compliance.

Using suitable symbols and colors

Map symbols stand in for entities simplifying intricate geospatial forms into intuitive pictograms through controlled abstraction. Certain symbols evoke inherent meaning like trees for forests or houses for settlements. Design styling to resonate based on cultural and domain conventions. Colors should group logically, be sufficiently distinct, and readable in gray-scale. Qualitative schemes follow spectral order while sequential ones map data properties to luminances. Apply consistently across products and platforms to ingrain associations. Always test with representatives from the target demographic and refine accordingly.

Labeling features effectively

Word placement provides precise language-based descriptions for location-based elements. Careful rendering allows spatial context and language meaning to coexist legibly through conflict avoidance. Prioritize labels for heavily trafficked and distinguishing features over those determinable through location. Omit generic names in dense clusters. Enable interactive isolation and data quality warnings where space forces illegibility. Choose tones maximizing contrast with surroundings. Allow toggling between horizontal and curved options. Audit regularly as base data characteristics evolve over time.

Streamlining Interactions

GIS platforms enable active exploration, analysis and decision-making through dynamic interfaces. Ensure core capabilities like panning, zooming and querying spatial information are easily accessible through intuitive controls and workflows. Allow filtering and highlighting to isolate relevant attributes and records for simplified processing. Use custom styling and annotation tools to capture user insights and commentary. Link multimedia content like imagery and statistical outputs to convey supporting evidence and add richer context.

Enabling panning, zooming, and querying

Smooth navigation interaction paradigms allow effortlessly updating the geographic extent and scale to traverse areas of interest. Optimize ergonomics with controls that leverage innate mental models – arrows shift the view, scales zoom in and out. Support text and shape-based queries that intelligently extract locations, summaries and time-series analytics. Integrate contextual filters exposing relevant attributes. Link selections across charts, reports and dashboards for coordinated insights.

Allowing data filtering and highlighting

Searching and faceting geographic datasets generates targeted subsets for closer inspection by statistics or location. Build query interfaces that structure parameters logically, provide previews, suggest completions and visualize results. Enable persistent filters to carry over between sessions. Use highlight colors that stand out when selected but recede when inactive. Allow individual and grouped selections with mechanisms to fine-tune memberships and nested logic.

Supporting custom styling and annotations

Enhancing maps directly conveys user perspectives tailored to unique use cases. Flexible styling tools empower tweaking colors, symbols and even classification methods. Ensure enough controls to achieve precise objectives without overwhelming through too many options. Save and share personalized configs to enable consistency. Annotation layers capture observational insights, areas of interest and locations needing action. Allow markers, lines, shapes and text with attributes like color and icons.

Integrating multimedia content

Spatial analytics products should seamlessly incorporate photographic overlays, statistics, model outputs and stories. Imagery adds real-world visual context via temporal mosaics, streetviews and overhead captures. Statistical outputs help quantify patterns and trends. Interactive charts enforce analytic rigor through exposing variability and uncertainty. Storytelling functionality strings observations together into logical sequences with text, links and media. Cover supplementary usage rights within distribution policies.

Simplifying Analysis and Reporting

GIS derives insights from discovering and characterizing geographic patterns. Robust analytic tools help assess spatial relationships, distributions, densities and more. Build aggregation reports on information extracts like tabular exports. Design dashboards to capture trends and outliers. Use cartographic principles to evaluate quality and suggest improvements for maximum simplicity. Automate reporting then customize templates for reusability across questions, departments and audiences.

Summarizing spatial patterns

Quantifying map feature arrangements and proximity uncovers non-obvious trends. Enable buffer creation around assets with configurable distances to find neighboring entities. Analyze point densities through kernel density heatmaps showing hotspots and outliers. Generalize trends into spatial clusters with configurable geographies. Compare locations across attributes and entities with bivariate mapping. Provide statistics on changes over time using animations and small multiples. Identify outliers and anomalies through spatial autocorrelation.

Creating insightful charts and graphs

Visualizations should expose patterns, convey meaning and enforce analytic rigor. Follow best practices by ordering labels, starting axes at zero and benchmarking against expectations. Use histogram equalization and log scales to surface trends in skewed data. Group members intentionally and assign distinct easily-discernible colors. Minimize chartjunk without losing message dimensionality through aggregation and smoothing. Build interactivity to demand details on demand by isolating subgroups through clicking and cross-filtering.

Building interactive dashboards

Actionable dashboards centralize multiple contextual views across thematic topics. Structure logically through clear tabbed layout or nested hierarchical arrangements. Align temporal extents across visualizations for valid historic comparisons. Allow viewers to isolate branches through clicking related elements. Design visual hierarchy from high-level trends to detailed breakdowns through sizing and positioning choices. Enable snapshots to capture and share exactly parameterized panels and queries for offline review or simplified updating.

Generating shareable reports

Static printable reports make communicating insights simpler through curated views without interaction complexity. Follow consistent templates between reports for findability. Structure with executives in mind by leading with biggest takeaways and bolstering with detailed sections. Include methodological and technical details like quality caveats and field descriptions in appendices to assist substantiating without overwhelming upfront. Export maps, charts and tables using universal formats to enable reuse across contexts.

Automating Workflows

Standardizing processes around data management, analysis and reporting increases efficiency and consistency. Implement data models encouraging properly configured additions through forms, imports and services. Configure robust default stylistic rules and templates that incorporate domain knowledge for increased automation. Schedule jobs to run statistical computations like new record indentification after database updates. Allow batch operations across user groups saving time and ensuring uniformity.

Standardizing data models

Carefully structured data lays the groundwork for usable information generation. Build cleanliness into acquisition through validation checks and lookups. Enforce integrity through relationship rules between entities around cardinality, data types and acceptable values. Embed metadata like descriptions, owners and quality warnings through augmentation tables or schematized triple storage for findability. Expose through reporting interfaces and export formats to assist proper interpretation and joining.

Setting up templates

Reusable templates multiply efforts by providing starting structures for common output types. Craft visually polished graphic templates around project goals with color palettes, iconography and style guides baked in. Configure saved queries and analysis chains tailored to answer routine statistical questions. Standard report shells apply the latest printable format specs and header content. Allow author customization through exposing parameters while retaining core structure and branding.

Configuring jobs to run analyses

Automating analysis steps via scheduled computational jobs saves resources while ensuring consistency. Build a library of statistical operations like spatial joins, proximity buffers and attribute calculations. Chain together sequences based on output dependencies through graphical workflow managers. Configure triggering conditions like database updates, time intervals or external alerts. Validate results through email summaries or raising flags around quality thresholds. Adjust and expand modular steps to adapt to evolving practices.

Allowing batch processing and updates

Systems leveraging bulk operations better meet big data visualization and analysis challenges around scalability and timeliness through streamlined updating. Use loose coupling and asynchronous processes to prevent resource contention across components. Partition work units for independent parallelized handling then reintegrate. Provide batch data loading capabilities with validation to ingest new captures, telemetry streams or model outputs. Enable bulk editing capabilities but require archiving prior versions for accountability.

Collaborating Across Teams

Organizational coordination around shared geographic data matures analysis and communication efficacy. Foster openness through enabling discovery across groups while retaining safeguards against inappropriate changes. Track all modifications with attributed version histories for accountability and merging up divergent work. Allow simultaneous editing for high tempo contexts. Standardize access by integrating federated identity provisioning aligned to internal user roles and responsibilities.

Managing user permissions

Balance openness for collaboration with governance through user access controls. Assign hierarchical organization and workspace-specific roles like viewers, editors or administrators through groups. Implement data hiding, masking and synthesis techniques for privacy protection where necessary. Audit activity streams to link actions to individuals in the event accountability is necessary. Allow permissions inheritance so libraries of templates and other assets remain accessible to new personnel reorganizations.

Enabling concurrent editing

Allowing multiple users to simultaneously modify the same hosted data streams coordination and accelerates delivery. Provide visual indicators around editing instances through owner attribution and conflict highlighting. Implement transactional integrity through record locking and smart graceful merging. Notify collaborators upon conflicting changes for manual resolution. Maintain full histories of changes rather than just net differences to fully understand divergent contexts.

Tracking versions and changes

Edit histories provide essential context by attributing specific modifications to their originating authors along the evolutionary timeline. Visualize differences between versions at variable granularity like attribute, record and field level. Analyze divergent branches to qualitatively understand derivation of alternate perspectives. Quantify variance and volatility over time through statistical aggregation for quality assurance. Support rollback to prior versions for cases requiring authoritative restoration.

Integrating with other tools and portals

Linking geospatial tooling together into unified enterprise stacks makes experiences more seamless by eliminating context switching. Provide extendable published interfaces around visualization, analytics and downstream data movement through APIs. Allow embedding maps and stats into internal wikis, portals and applications through iframes and widgets. Implement single sign-on by integrating organizational identify providers using federated protocols like OAuth and SAML.