Extended Focus & Context for Visualizing Abstract Data on Maps

Traditionally, the subject of cartography has been geographic data, while information visualization has dealt with abstract, non-spatial information. With the ever increasing amount of data harvested worldwide, more and more of this data includes both geographic and abstract information at the same time. Efficient visualization of this data calls for the combination of maps with techniques for complex, structured information spaces, a key concept among these being focus & context techniques. In this paper, an extended focus & context concept is proposed that efficiently supports the combination of visualization techniques with maps.