Visualization for constructing and sharing geo-scientific concepts

doi:10.1073/pnas.0307755101

Visualization for constructing and sharing geo-scientific concepts

GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University, 302 Walker, University Park, PA 16802

Abstract

Representations of scientific knowledge must reflect the dynamic nature of knowledge construction and the evolving networks of relations between scientific concepts. In this article, we describe initial work toward dynamic, visual methods and tools that support the construction, communication, revision, and application of scientific knowledge. Specifically, we focus on tools to capture and explore the concepts that underlie collaborative science activities, with examples drawn from the domain of human-environment interaction. These tools help individual researchers describe the process of knowledge construction while enabling teams of collaborators to synthesize common concepts. Our visualization approach links geographic visualization techniques with concept-mapping tools and allows the knowledge structures that result to be shared through a Web portal that helps scientists work collectively to advance their understanding. Our integration of geovisualization and knowledge representation methods emphasizes the process through which abstract concepts can be contextualized by the data, methods, people, and perspectives that produced them. This contextualization is a critical component of a knowledge structure, without which much of the meaning that guides the sharing of concepts is lost. By using the tools we describe here, human-environment scientists are given a visual means to build concepts from data (individually and collectively) and to connect these concepts to each other at appropriate levels of abstraction.

Footnotes

↵ * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: maceachren{at}psu.edu.
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “Mapping Knowledge Domains,” held May 9-11, 2003, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA.
Abbreviation: HERO, Human Environment Regional Observatory.
↵ † Although no shortage of available data exists, these data do not completely describe one's objects of study. Just as concepts merely refer to more abstract representations in the mind, data are a proxy for the phenomena they are intended to measure. For instance, there is no objective measurement for the concept of “vulnerability”; there are only other phenomena, such as flood frequency or demographics, that may be measured (and even these, incompletely).