Spatiotemporal Phenomena Summarization through Static Visual Narratives

Information visualization commonly aids the understanding of the evolution of spatiotemporal phenomena. The current work proposes a novel approach to visually represent spatiotemporal phenomena based on the automated generation of static and interactive visual narratives that summarize the evolution of a spatiotemporal phenomenon. The visual narrative is composed of an interactive storyboard that consists of a set of frames that represent events of interest in the phenomenon. Towards corroborating the hypothesis that this approach would effectively and efficiently transmit the evolution of spatiotemporal phenomena, we conceptualized a visualization framework, identifying visual metaphors that map spatiotemporal transformations into visual content and defining the parameterization approaches for spatiotemporal features. We developed a functional prototype implementing the conceptual solution and presented issues encountered regarding visual clutter and parameterization. We conducted a user study based on a questionnaire which concluded that the proposed approach can be effective and efficient for understanding the evolution of these phenomena in terms of transformations for a subset of possible scenarios.