Developing Geo-temporal Context from Implicit Sources with Geovisual Analytics

The key Geovisual Analytics research question addressed in this paper is how knowledge of past situations can be computationally extracted from heterogeneous and implicit information spaces and presented as visual artifacts within an interactive environment to facilitate reasoning about situations from geographic and temporal (or geo-temporal) contextual perspectives. This paper in particular will examine the shared development of geo-temporal context from implicit geospatial and temporal references contained in open-source channels such as the news media to support situation assessment in crisis management activities. The paper presents the “Context Discovery Application” (CDA), which is a prototype collaborative, Geovisual Analytics situation assessment environment that facilitates the development of geographical and temporal context using implicit sources.