Immersive analytics with augmented reality in meteorology: an exploratory study on ontology and linked data

Abstract

Although Augmented Reality (AR) has been extensively studied in supporting Immersive Analytics (IA), there are still many challenges in visualising and interacting with big and complex datasets. To deal with these datasets, most AR applications utilise NoSQL databases for storing and querying data, especially for managing large volumes of unstructured or semi-structured data. However, NoSQL databases have limitations in their reasoning and inference capabilities, which can result in insufficient support for certain types of queries. To fill this gap, we aim to explore and evaluate whether an intelligent approach based on ontology and linked data can facilitate visual analytics tasks with big datasets on AR interface. We designed and implemented a prototype of this method for meteorological data analytics. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the use of a semantic database with linked data compared to a conventional approach in an AR-based immersive analytics system. The results significantly highlight the performance of semantic approach in helping the users analysing meteorological datasets and their subjective appreciation in working with the AR interface, which is enhanced with ontology and linked data.