The Invisip project

Riccardo Albertoni

IMATI/CNR (I)

Abstract

INVISIP: "Information Visualisation in the Site Planning Process" is a project supported by the European Commission in the Information Society Technology (IST) program (IST-2000-29640). The project aimed to create a framework to support all involved parties in the site planning process. During the project, a technical platform has been developed to facilitate information access and data handling for the site planning process.

In this presentation we propose an approach to access geo data by exploring their metadata.
It focuses on data selection issue that characterises the process of geo-data access. A basic problem in the design of a geographic information system is the search for actual and expressive geo-data and their analysis. Metadata, data about data, describe the content, the quality, the condition and other characteristics of data. The international metadata standard for geographic information, ISO 19115 (ISO, 2003), has been defined with the aim of providing a common set of terminology and definitions for the documentation of digital geographic data. The search for available geo-data is performed by analysing the repositories of their metadata. Repositories of geographic metadata can be very large as well as highly dimensional and traditional automatic exploration approaches do not perform well on such datasets.
We propose a novel exploration approach: it aims to be a user-friendly and easy to understand way to explore geographic metadata and to support decision-making within the site planning process. It is based on visual data mining as a combination of traditional data mining techniques and visualisation. In particular we propose to apply visualisation and graphic interaction techniques to navigate the unfamiliar information spaces and to discover relationships between geo-data. This approach aims to help the user to acquire new knowledge about the metadata, consisting of relationships, correlations and similarities among data and to find a compromise between what he is looking for and what is available.