Visualization Framework for the Integration and Exploration of Heterogeneous Geospatial Data

Abstract

This paper presents an interactive visualization framework for heterogeneous geospatial data developed in context of an interdisciplinary research project that aims at the risk analysis of sea-dumped chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea. In the focus of the analysis are geophysical, hydrographical, geochemical, and biological data acquired on research cruises as well as data produced by toxic compound migration and bioaccumulation modeling. These different types of data to be visualized are represented as height fields, 2D vector maps, seismic profiles, and time-dependent scalar and vector fields. In general, these datasets are given at largely varying resolutions and geospatial extents, which makes their integration into one visualization especially challenging and requires efficient level-of-detail techniques. Furthermore, special care is taken on the appropriate integration and efficient 3D visualization of all different types of data at the same time. Several examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the resulting visualizations for collaborative analysis of the data.