The Context Discovery Application
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Context is an important concept for understanding the world. For crisis management, context includes: where the crisis is occurring, what events have transpired, and who is involved. Geography and history offer unique perspectives on context through study of the interconnectedness of phenomena, events, and places across multiple spatial and temporal scales through which situations are understood. Therefore, visual analytics tools that support construction of a geo-historical context for sensemaking are important aids for analysts working on activities ranging from peacekeeping operations, to disaster management, to planning for resilient communities. One such tool, the Context Discovery Application (CDA), was originally developed at the GeoVISTA Center at Penn State, a VACCINE partner institution, by Dr. Brian Tomaszewski in collaboration with Dr. Alan MacEachren.
This view of the CDA shows the geographic components of information extracted from text documents mapped on both a 2D map built into the CDA and on an independent 3D Google Earth™ view. The points depict origins of news stories and the lines connect them to additional places mentioned in the text. Dynamic linking of the two map views enables an analyst to save contextually relevant information extracted from Google Earth. Here, the user saves information from a news story mentioning Omdurman (see snippet in GE view, left) to the 2D map within the CDA (red markers indicate other saved information).
As presented at the recent IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (IEEE VAST), the CDA is a prototype web application that supports knowledge-enabled retrieval of news stories and other documents relevant to user-specified issues and places. It extracts and geo-tags references to places and enables situation assessment through web-map services that build a geo-historical context through which to interpret ongoing events. PHOTO CAPTION: This view of the CDA shows the geographic components of information extracted from text documents mapped on both a 2D map built into the CDA and on an independent 3D Google Earth™ view. The points depict origins of news stories and the lines connect them to additional places mentioned in the text. Dynamic linking of the two map views enables an analyst to save contextually relevant information extracted from Google Earth. Here, the user saves information from a news story mentioning Omdurman (see snippet in GE view, left) to the 2D map within the CDA (red markers indicate other saved information).
The CDA is being further developed for use by analysts at the United Nations. Tomaszewski, now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Sciences & Technologies at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), working in partnership with the United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response (UN-SPIDER), the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), is using visual analytics approaches to examine the effects of the global economic crisis on poverty and vulnerability as revealed through natural disaster impacts in Africa. A variety of indicators, such as household poverty figures, import/export figures of key African commodities (cotton, palm oil etc.), changing land use/land cover patterns, and economic and social disaster impact data, will be incorporated into the next generation of visual analytics tools designed to help analysts understand global economic crisis impacts on the poor and vulnerable. The team is funded by the Rapid Impact and Vulnerability Analysis Fund (RIVAF) of the UN Global Pulse initiative.
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