Supporting geographically-aware web document foraging and sensemaking

This paper reports on the development and application of strategies and tools for geographic information seeking and knowledge building that leverages unstructured text resources found on the web. Geographic knowledge building from unstructured web sources starts with web document foraging during which the quantity, scope and diversity of web-based information create incredible cognitive burdens on an analyst‟s or researcher‟s ability to judge information relevancy. Determining information relevancy is ultimately a process of sensemaking. In this paper, we present our research on visually supporting web document foraging and sensemaking. In particular, we present the Senseof-Place (SensePlace) analytic environment. The scientific goal of SensePlace is to visually and computationally support analyst sensemaking with text artifacts that have potential place, time, and thematic relevance to an analytical problem through identification and visual highlighting of named entities (people...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: URBAN
• Authors: Brian M. Tomaszewski, Justine Blanford, Kevin Ross, Scott Pezanowski, Alan M. MacEachren
• Keywords: Documents, Infectious Disease Dynamics, Knowledge Building, URBAN 2011