Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Dipartimento di Informatica
e-mail mapisnet07
@dsi.unive.it
MapISNet'07
Map Based Interaction in Social Networks
http://www.dsi.unive.it/mapisnet07
A workshop held in conjunction with INTERACT2007
11th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
September 10, 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
http://www.interact2007.org/
Aims, Goals and Topics | Submission, Dates and Proceedings | Organization | Program | Discussion
The discussion after the presentation focused on problems in designing maps when they are accessible to different communities of users and editable by many co-authors.
In general terms, it is difficult to define general rules: designers face single cases.
From a technical point of view, many tools are developed and many information can be displayed together on the map: the risk is the cognitive overload of users because they have too many ways of interaction with the map and because they cannot manage at one time all the displayed information. This problem deals with the human selective attention: dynamics, animation and use of overlays for managing information on the map have to be customized according to user needs and capabilities.
From a designing point of view, the problem is involving users in the design, considering them as experts and studying how to support their experience. In the case o f a social interaction, with a community of users interacting through a map, the design problem is also to permit the appropriation of the available technologies to the community. It is also a problem of localization, i.e. creating tools customizable to community’s cultures. Web maps are accessible potentially from everywhere: supporting cultural diversities and overcoming cultural misunderstanding in communicate through a shared map is a complex challenge. A general solution is to use internationalization technique. An other solution can be to offer to users tools for creating their own language on building the map.
At a use level, an issue is to understand how to create a consistent map: how many users can be involved in building a map without loss of consistency?
This last issue also concerns the problem of managing shared maps. When many users of a community can annotate the map, a moderator can be needed: sometimes s/he can be identify as a “natural” role (e.g., the case of teachers in the SketchMap experiments), in other cases s/he can emerge as a leader in a discussion involving several co-authors or several co-authors can find a balance among them in defining acceptable annotations.
All these themes need further exploration. It is useful to focus specific subjects for next discussions in workshops or publications. Two main themes have been identified:
The complexity of providing mapmaking tools to end users entails a balance of allowing the addition of rich semantic meaning while preserving the data abstraction/data reduction goals of map design. While spatial and dimensional learning are critical components for building and then interpreting maps (topographic, topological, etc.), merely throwing a bunch of digitized tools into the hands of users won't necessarily result in meaningful experience; some important constructs around what end user's goals and motivations may be needs to inform design decisions.
The two most interesting themes that emerged at the workshop were the issues of localization of the sets of cartographic symbols and also the idea of cognitive overload that may happen if we try to display too much on the map. I would like to explore the topic of localization of cartographic semantics in more detail, especially as it relates to user-generated maps. Users maycreate their own meanings for symbols on the map and they may use their own cartographic conventions. This means that our tools need to support localization for sets of symbols that we, as developers, are not even aware of. As for cognitive overload, I would also like to look at it from the viewpoint of the user-generated maps. As we allow people to post content on maps, how do we prevent them from posting too much? How do we support them in only posting content that is meaningful to others and adds value to the map? [I felt that the workshop was very thought-provoking, but I think it could have benefited from a larger number of attendees, especially those from the industry.]
Geo-spatial maps are enormously effective not only because they are familiar, but also but because they are based on a meaningful underlying two-dimensional substrate of latitude and longitude (assuming a Mercator or other projection), on which land/sea areas are situated. Then cities/rivers/highways objects are placed on the areas. East-West and North-South are preserved as are distances. On the other extreme, there are many two-dimensional layouts which do not have meaningful axes or distance preserving properties, notably the widely used force-directed approach for social network layout. Similarly, multi-dimensional scaling or Sammon maps do NOT have meaningful axes and distances between objects. As a result these layouts are unstable, in the sense that addition or deletion of single objects could cause wide variations in placement of all objects. A reasonable compromise would be forms of stable and meaningful substrates on which objects can be placed. These substrates should have meaningful axes, and enable users to see where there were many objects (clusters) and where there were none (gaps). We have developed a tool NVSS 2.0 (Network Visualization by Semantic Substrates) that enables users to specify a substrate on which nodes can be placed. Another tool, MediaFinder, allows users to specify regions on which photos are placed according to the attributes of the photo. Finally D-Dupe uses a simple five region substrate to present information for decision making about entity resolution, such as detecting alternate author names in bibliographic databases.
How to create consistent maps? How many users in building map?
Which social parameters for map design: e.g. number of people, interests of people…
Sketching permits to users to show different ways in which they “capture” real world
1. Design of maps for social network style information- plenty of
guidelines on how to do so- Ware, Tufte, Wilkinson, and my own work on
interactive visualisations - dynamic displays and overlays.
2. Use of maps as a medium for social communication- annotation on maps, people appropriate technology (GoogleMaps) and add their own info- sharing spatially indexed information.
3. Use of maps and diagrams to understand social relationships, groups and networks.
Need to define the research questions in each areas.
MapISNet'07 Scientific Secretary
Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Dipartimento di Informatica
e-mail mapisnet07@dsi.unive.it
 Dipartimento di Informatica Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia |
 Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione Università degli Studi di Milano |