Interactive Tag Maps and Tag Clouds for the Multiscale Exploration of Large Spatio-temporal Datasets

Abstract

'Tag clouds' and 'tag maps' are introduced to represent geographically referenced text. In combination, these aspatial and spatial views are used to explore a large structured spatio-temporal data set by providing overviews and filtering by text and geography. Prototypes are implemented using freely available technologies including Google Earth and Yahoo! 's Tag Map applet. The interactive tag map and tag cloud techniques and the rapid prototyping method used are informally evaluated through successes and limitations encountered. Preliminary evaluation suggests that the techniques may be useful for generating insights when visualizing large data sets containing geo-referenced text strings. The rapid prototyping approach enabled the technique to be developed and evaluated, leading to geovisualization through which a number of ideas were generated. Limitations of this approach are reflected upon. Tag placement, generalisation and prominence at different scales are issues which have come to light in this study that warrant further work.