Data Characterization Schema for Intelligent Support in Visual Data Analysis

Abstract

The project CommonGIS aims at building a system allowing users to view and analyze geographically referenced thematic data. The system is oriented to the general public, i.e. people without special training and expertise in map design. Therefore the system is required to understand data semantics that, hence, must be formally represented. The project involves development of a data characterization schema that defines what knowledge about the data and in what form should be provided to the system for enabling intelligent and userfriendly support in visual data analysis. In this paper we propose a schema developed on the basis of the approach adopted in the system Descartes for automated thematic mapping. The approach involves creation of a domain model containing relevant notions and establishing of a correspondence between data components and the notions. Presence of the domain model is the main difference of the described schema from the ones proposed earlier for the purposes of automated data visualization.