Finding communication hot spots of location-based postings

The growing amount of location-based public postings will challenge the current visualization and access methods of location-based information. The aim of our work is to provide a clear overview of location-based postings and to support easy access to information the user is interested in. We designed a prototype using a semi-transparent heat map over a map view to visualize posting density on the area of interest. Automatically extracted keywords and dynamic time selection support the search and filtering of location-based public postings. Based on our evaluation, users found the heat map as a familiar abstraction of the location based information. Clustering and displaying the salient words as keywords over the map view was considered to be especially useful.