Visualizing and Interacting with Geospatial Networks: A Survey and Design Space

TL;DR

This survey reviews visualization and interaction techniques for geospatial networks, analyzing 95 papers to understand how they represent and integrate geographic and network data while balancing information richness and readability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive framework for classifying and comparing techniques based on four key dimensions of geospatial network visualization.

Findings

Identifies key trade-offs in representing geographic and network information.

Classifies techniques along four dimensions: geographic, network, integration, interaction.

Highlights gaps and future directions in geospatial network visualization.

Abstract

This paper surveys visualization and interaction techniques for geospatial networks from a total of 95 papers. Geospatial networks are graphs where nodes and links can be associated with geographic locations. Examples can include social networks, trade and migration, as well as traffic and transport networks. Visualizing geospatial networks poses numerous challenges around the integration of both network and geographical information as well as additional information such as node and link attributes, time, and uncertainty. Our overview analyzes existing techniques along four dimensions: i) the representation of geographical information, ii) the representation of network information, iii) the visual integration of both, and iv) the use of interaction. These four dimensions allow us to discuss techniques with respect to the trade-offs they make between showing information across all these dimensions and how they solve the problem of showing as much information as necessary while maintaining readability of the visualization. https://geonetworks.github.io.