The second day of the summer school started with a session by Gennady Andrienko with the topic of visual analytics and visual data mining. The topic is thus right up my alley. Andrienko mostly demonstrated their own developed visualization software called Commongis. The main feature of Commongis is that it supports several integrated, linked views i.e. several visualizations, both statistical and geographic. Additionally the views are all interactive, which means the visualization can be clicked, selected and dragged.  The tool is fairly impressive, especially the integrated interactive part. It is (or seems to be) impressively fast, as it offers clustering (k-means at least) and other computations on-the-fly.

Andrienko also presented their “invention” of the bi-directional colour scale. Which is very good at visualizing comparisons from one reference value relative to the rest of the data. The bi-directional scale used was mostly beige/brown (high value) and blue (low value). With the reference value being white. This should definitely be used more! An interesting application could be to visualize a conceptual relationship between concepts.

The session consisted of several examples of different visualization techniques. Some of them; Parallell coordinates, time-graph series (?), and bar charts/histograms on top of clustered map. The latter I found to be, well, to cluttered. However, for some applications it could be very useful.

I found the session to be spawning my creative thoughts, and thus, quite good. However, this was mostly due to the screenshots/demos, and not necessarily the “reading of slides”.

Then it was time for lunch. Kjöttbullar with Lingon, which actually was meat loaf with Lingon (cranberry jam). The Lingon was regarded as a weird thing, which it in some sense is.

After this, Jean-Claude Thill had arrived and was going to take his scheduled session.

Mr. Thill is truly a speaker. Not respecting the schedule, at all. However, to some degree this didn’t matter that much. The session was largely on Self Organizing Maps (SOM) which Mr. Thill truly enjoys. And it seems like there are a lot of GISc persons who enjoy SOMs, however, I do not. It is probably useful, however, I cannot see the real use or application for it. Probably due to my interest for interactivity, on-the-fly things and highly intuitive visualizations. Which I haven’t seen SOMs do – yet.

In the end Thill presented an idea of absolute vs. relative space. I.e. space is not inherently geographical, or spatial – it could as well be functional or social. I actually found the idea fairly similar to what I’m thinking on visualization and space as such. Thill did not go very far into this at this session, but was going to have a session later this week on the same subject.

Then it was time for dinner, which consisted of a buffet and was ok.

Dinner was followed by a new session with Mr. Thill on Paper writing and publishing. Which was suitable since Thill is the editor of a journal. The session consisted of guidelines and tips for writing and how to get published in international peer-reviewed scientific journals. Which was useful. However to a large degree common sense does fit well also. Interestingly Thill suggests to write with clarity and keep it at a fair length, i.e. not to write something just to get the paper longer. All in all a good guideline. However, he did not apply the guideline for his presentation, which lasted from about 1800 to 21:30, which is a bit long..

With that, day 2 was finished.

I’m currently attending the NordGIScience summer school and thought it could be of value to add some posts related to it.

I arrived at Gävle late sunday evening and found the hotell fairly easy.  The hotell is ok, but nothing more.

Monday started off with registration and some opening notes with an emphasis on the networking opportunities that the summer school offered.  Which is nice, in my oppinion. The original plan was that Jean-Claude Thill was going to hold a lecture , unfortunately Mr. Thill was stuck in Atlanta airport due to bad weather. This resulted in Bin Jiang stepping in and taking the first part of the lecture.  The lecture consisted of a (very) brief introduction to Knowledge Discovery, (Spatial) Data Mining, Self Organising Maps (which later should be of huge importance) and the importance of the notion that “Spatial is Special”(!). Mr. Jiang is an energetic person, which held a lively presentation.

Following was lunch break in the cantina. The lunch consisted of a pasta salad with chicken,  green salad and tzatziki. Which was quite amusing for the Italian guy:)

Then it was time for the afternoon session which Vasily Popovich had responsibility for.

This session consisted of a theoretical lecture followed by a practical session using the Intelligent GIS tool developed by the oogis.ru team. In short the intelligent GIS idea consists of integrating techniques from the field of artifical intelligence (AI) with GIS techniques, mainly computational techniques.

The tool develop implemented this by the combination of using an Ontology, Rule base, Rule engine, traditional relational database and a map visualization tool. In short the tool is an extension to the ontology/rule engine Protégé. I’ve been using Protégé before, and find the principle idea of ontologies fascinating and potential very useful. However, I do not see the potential of success for ontologies with the current human interface for them. The current interfaces I’ve been looking at (such as Protégé) have issues, especially regarding usability. It is almost impossible to create and maintain a large, stable ontology without dedicating a large portion of your life to it. Unfortunately this was the case for the intelligent GIS as well. Although the ontology was created for us, and we only flickered with some instances and some rules associated with them. I strongly believe this needs better visual interactive interfaces. Probably the most needed feature is, in my opinion, to be able to easily get a quick, and correct, overview of the complete ontology, knowledge base and rules – in one view. Similar to what we find in conceptual modelling for large enterprise systems. However Intelligent GIS is  a good idea, which I definately see the potential and use of, however, if humans are supposed to use it effectively, then it needs to satisfy the humans requirements for usability and interaction.

The first day of the summer school ended with dinner at a local restaurant (greek or persian).