2.5D Focus+Context Map Visualization

Many applications involve map visualization. Nevertheless, almost all of them display the map in the same style, which often cause information overloading. In this paper, we present a novel user-centered 2.5D focus context map visualization technique. Instead of treating all the information equally, we can custom the map according to user requirements. The main contributions of our technique are in three aspects. Firstly, our system can automatically construct a hierarchical representation of the city according to the focus point of the users by using the R-trees data structure, then presenting users the map in multiple rendering styles, highlighting the user concerned information and deemphasizing the less important information. Secondly, a landmark margin is automatically added to the original map according to the points-of-interest(POI), which illustrates the context information and enables users to maintain a macro view of the city. Moreover, by applying the 2.5D technique, we can reduce the amount of data and accelerate the transport of the information. The results show that our user-centered map visualization technique can greatly improve the efficiency for users to get their concerned information.