SpaceCuts: Making Room for Visualizations on Maps

Visual map features like streets, rail tracks, or rivers do not provide enough space to visualize multiple attributes on them. Related approaches to solve space issues distort the map with lenses, apply distortion techniques to the map geometry, or employ three dimensional visualizations. All these techniques come at the cost of distortion or overlapping of relevant map features or they even produce overlap of visualized data. In this paper, we present SpaceCuts, a technique to generate additional space for data visualization on maps that does not distort the map and introduces only minimal overlap by cutting the map along a geographic structure and pulling the resulting areas apart. Besides introducing the basic technique, we discuss possible interactions, further extensions, application scenarios, and outline potential future research.