IntelliView

IntelliView provides set of functions, which manage visualization. Besides geocoding, that is inevitable to find specific location, main stress is laid in choosing and organizing elements on map. Due to enormous number of items to be displayed, IntelliView must choose only a subset of these items in order to maintain lucid view. To accomplish this, items are sorted by priority. Prioritisation as well as some other principles is based on most common visualization techniques that can be found in Bing Maps, Google maps, and also in well-known ESRI’s geographic information system (GIS) software products.

With list of items sorted by priority, IntelliView aims to achieve following basic goals:

  • display as many information as possible,
  • display items with higher priority first,
  • illustrate density of items,
  • maintain simplicity of view.

We try to achieve greater accuracy of displaying priority by dividing whole viewport into grid and considering items isolated, individually in each cell. Thus, each cell has its own representative, which is dominating in the centre of this cell. Items in lower levels of importance are displayed similarly as in preceding method around cell's representative. While having improved accuracy of priority order depiction, this method has also better performance in calculation following principles of divide and conquers.
However, in this case, location of item cannot be determined due to error caused by centralization within cell. The goal of centralization is to avoid collision problems on neighbouring cell's bounds. As a positive side effect, due to uniform distribution of items on the map, this view is symmetric and more readable, too.

RealView

The integration of social networks and the visual representation have the purpose to make the system attractive and alive over time. RealView brings the activity to the end users by showing them actions performed by others in near real time. The RealView algorithm processes actions that other users perform within the viewing area and displays them as animations on the map.
The decision process is time sensitive and is based on a modified version of the relevancy system that is used in IntelliView. The time sensitivity means that despite of not showing all of the actions in the viewing area, the algorithm still has to be aware of the rate at which the actions happen.

We briefly introduce two specific implementations of this concept. The algorithm maintains an ordered list of actions and the number of actions from the last animation. Then every time a given number of actions are processed, it picks the first one and displays its animation.

The ordering is performed in a following way:

  • when an action is intercepted, its relevancy value is calculated,
  • all actions with lower relevancy are dismissed from the list,
  • the processed action is added to the end of the list.
This ensures that the first action in the list has always the highest relevancy and that we keep all consequent animations.