Augmenting User Cognition of Geospatial Data Through Interactive Spatial Data Infrastructures

Geographical datasets are large, complex, and can be difficult for users to navigate and derive meaning from. These datasets, as well as the unique insights derived from them, provide tremendous opportunity for social change – many of the global challenges humankind is currently facing can benefit from analytics or visualization tools applied to geospatial data. Previous research has introduced platforms for storing and visualizing geospatial datasets, but lacks a platform for presenting this information in an immersive and multimodal way that enhances the user's cognition of the data. In this thesis, I investigate the challenge of, and propose a solution for, displaying and interacting with geospatial data through visualization and sonification. This solution enables users to create a multi-modal representation that is capable of empowering interactive geospatial data exploration. The methodology is integrated into a fully interoperable, standards-compliant spatial data infrastructure, ensuring that the method can be applied to a variety of datasets and application models to tackle a wide range of real-world challenges.

Major Advisor: Raffaele De Amicis
Committee: Margaret Burnett
Committee: Christopher Sanchez
GCR: Kyle Niemeyer