Enhancing Situation Awareness in Real Time Geospatial Visualization

Today’s hardware and software infrastructure enables large-scale visualization of (near) real-time data in a geospatial context, which is attractive in a variety of application areas ranging from military applications to disaster management and incident response. The drawback on the other hand is that combined visualizations might lead to an overload of human processing capacity, for instance if multiple dynamic aspects must be observed in parallel. The objective for our research is to develop a solution which enhances the situation awareness of the user by identifying the appropriate means of visualizing information based on the user’s task and a given situation. In this paper, we propose an approach and associated system architecture how this objective can be reached. The primary ingredient of our approach is the combination of a GIS system and logic-based ontology representation and reasoning system.