GeoVISTA Studio: A Geocomputational Workbench

One barrier to the uptake of Geocomputation is that, unlike GIS, it has no system or toolbox that provides easy access to useful functionality. This paper describes an experimental environment, GeoVISTA Studio, that attempts to address this shortcoming. Studio is a Java-based, visual programming environment that allows for the rapid, programming free development of complex data exploration and knowledge construction applications to support geographic analysis. It achieves this by leveraging advances in geocomputation, software engineering, visualisation and machine learning. At the time of writing, Studio contains full 3D rendering capability and has the following functionality: interactive parallel coordinate plots, visual classifier, sophisticated colour selection (including Munsell colour-space), spreadsheet, statistics package, self-organising map (SOM) and learning vector quantisation. Through examples of Studio at work, this paper demonstrates the roles that geocomputation and visualization can play throughout the scientific cycle of knowledge creation, emphasising their supportive and mutually beneficial relationship. A brief overview of the design of Studio is also given. Results are presented to show practical benefits of a combined visual and geocomputational approach to analysing and understanding complex geospatial datasets.