Adaptive Geovisualization - an approach towards the design of intelligent geovisualization systems

Adaptive geovisualization has been marked as a research front that addresses design issues of a user-centered geovisualization system. By constantly keeping trace of user actions, a highly adaptive geovisualization system is able to predict the behavior of its end user and accordingly provide him with the visualization that suits best his personal taste and need. An adaptive geovisualization system does not either hide its own behaviors from its end users. Such a mutual transparency is made possible by the mechanism of self-description and –evaluation coupled with the capability of self-organization and –navigation based on user models. This paper clarifies some major concepts and techniques of adaptive geovisualization, pinpoints the existing bottlenecks, analyses the main components of an adaptive geovisualization system, and puts forward some research directions. Among others, the authors have discussed topics such as adaptive GUI design, dynamic structuring and re-structuring of databases, adaptive design of geo-query functions (intelligent geo-database navigation), adaptive symbolization etc.