Tumasch Reichenbacher

University of Zurich | UZH · Department of Geography

Mobile maps are an important tool for mastering modern digital life. In this paper, we outline our perspective on the challenges and opportunities associated with designing adaptive mobile maps that are useful, usable, and accessible to a wide range of users in different contexts. If we claim for adaptive mobile maps to be successful, we need to ex...

More and more cities try to encourage residents to cycle more. Therefore, governments are developing comprehensive bike maps to facilitate trip planning and increase the popularity of cycling. However, research on the topic of bike maps is rare and the versatility of possible features shown on a bike map makes these visually more complex than other...

Mobile maps are an integral part of our daily routines, serving a variety of purposes in different environments. Designing maps for different use situations is essential for a user-centered and context-aware approach. Previous research has explored map use context and context-aware mobile maps from interdisciplinary perspectives. This paper aims to...

Mobile map apps are rapidly changing the way we live by providing a broad range of services such as mapping, travel support, public transport, and trip-booking. Despite their widespread use, understanding how people use these apps in their everyday lives is still a challenge. In order to design context-aware mobile map apps, it is important to unde...

We present a first exploratory analysis of app usage collected from 38 participants with the tappigraphy approach. In addition to collecting tapping data of our participants, we registered the GPS locations during their phone sessions. Our analysis entails the density estimation of smartphone session usage and the inspection of potential effects of...

While map apps on smartphones are abundant, their everyday usage is still an open empirical research question. With tappigraphy – the quantification of smartphone touchscreen interactions – we aimed to capture continuous data stream of behavioural human-map app usage patterns. The current study introduces a first tappigraphy analysis of the distrib...

Ongoing urbanisation processes invoke immense construction activities, for which citizens often participate in planning. Yet, imagining planned buildings based on visual representations is a highly demanding task. While traditional methods, such as construction spans, 2D, or 3D visualisation often fail to offer a complete picture, we propose Augmen...

The increased use of mobile maps in our highly mobile digital culture has resulted in a large variety of map users and map use situations. For mobile map applications that engage a broad user base and feature diverging map usage contexts, one-size-fits-all map interface designs might result in significant usability tradeoffs. To respond to this cha...

Mobile map applications are increasingly used in various aspects of our lives, leading to an increase in different map use situations and, therefore, map use contexts. Several empirical usability studies have identified how map design is associated with and impacted by selected map use context attributes. This research seeks to expand on these stud...

The effectivity and efficiency of geovisual displays is highly dependent on visual search processes to detect, locate, and interpret relevant information for the tasks at hand. To speed up this process in interactive displays, a technique called “pop-out” is usually applied in order to afford visual prompts. By definition, such pop-outs depend on a...

The selection and retrieval of relevant information from the information universe on the web is becoming increasingly important in addressing information overload. It has also been recognized that geography is an important criterion of relevance, leading to the research area of geographic information retrieval. As users increasingly retrieve inform...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the emerging geographic features of current concepts of relevance, and to improve, modify, and extend the framework proposed by Mizzaro (1998). The objective is to define a new framework able to account, more completely and precisely, for the notions of relevance involved in mobile information seeki...

8th International Conference on Geographic Information Science GIScience2014, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria on September 23, 2014,

„Erfolgreich promovieren“ begleitet Promovierende aller Disziplinen durch die gesamte Promotion, von der Entscheidung zur Promotion, über die Planung, die Erstellung eines Exposés und dem Schreibprozess bis hin zur Fertigstellung der Dissertation, der Prüfung und Veröffentlichung. Zu den ausführlich behandelten Rahmenbedingungen zählen beispielswei...

Mobile geographic information seeking systems are often employed to support spatial activities in an unfamiliar geographic environment. However, current systems are unable to incorporate the spatio-temporal constraints of these activities in order to support this information seeking. This article describes a methodology addressing the nature of the...

The relevance of geographic information has become an emerging problem in geographic information science due to an enormous increase in volumes of data at high spatial, temporal, and semantic resolution, because of ever faster rates of new data capturing. At the same time, it is not clear whether the concept of relevance developed in information sc...

In this paper we provide a critical overview of the state of the art in human-centric intelligent data management approaches for geographic visualizations when we are faced with bandwidth limitations. These limitations often force us to rethink how we design displays for geographic visualizations. We need ways to reduce the amount of data to be vis...

Geographic information is increasingly used in mobile contexts. Mobility constrains several aspects of this mobile usage, such as limited screen estate, number of desired interactions, or availability due to battery time. As a consequence designers and developers of mobile geographic applications strive to reduce the amount of information delivered...

Geographic information is increasingly used in mobile contexts. Mobility constrains several aspects of this mobile usage, such as limited screen estate, number of desired interactions, or availability due to battery time. As a consequence designers and developers of mobile geographic applications strive to reduce the amount of information delivered...

In this paper, we present a new model for the assessment of Geographic Relevance. This model is drawn from Okapi BM25, thus it takes into account not only a score for each dimension of relevance but also the distribution of these scores within the collection. Preliminary results suggest that the relevance estimation of top-ranked objects is more se...

This paper addresses the applicability of classical Human Computer Interaction (HCI) methods to design usable interfaces to geographic information and the question for a need of specific methods taking into account the characteristics of spatial data. Based on design guidelines three prototypes of a user interface to an information platform for na...

LT C3: Informationssysteme zur Wissensgewinnung – Gefahren und Potenziale

In this position paper we describe the concept of geographic relevance and its potential for mobile location-based services employing the mobile Internet. We argue that existing LBS have a too limited concept of location and its application for filtering geographic content. We propose an approach for geographic relevance that extends LBS and locati...

Dieser Ratgeber richtet sich an Studierende bzw. Studierwillige aller Disziplinen. Er ermöglicht den Lesern in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, das Studium an der Universität, Fachhochschule oder Berufsakademie zielgerichtet zu gestalten. Von der ersten Orientierung an Ihrer Hochschule über Praktika und Auslandsaufenthalte bis zum Studienab...

It is a delicate task to design suitable geovisualisations that allow users an efficient visual processing of the depicted geographic information. Today, such a design task is subject to three major challenges: the ever growing amount of geospatial data at various levels of detail, the diversified applications of that data, and the continuously exp...

It is a delicate task to design suitable geovisualisations that allow users an efficient visual processing of geographic information. In digital era, such a design task is confronted with a three-fold challenge: the ever growing amount of geospatial data at various granularity levels, the diversified applications and the continuously expanding rang...

Although there has been successful work in developing image mining algorithms to extract in-formation, the visualisation of query results in Image Information Mining (IIM) systems is still not well adapted to the human cognitive skill of visual information processing. The main value of processing remotely sensed images is reflected in basic factors...

Mobile map based services and location-based services (LBS) are going places. Yet, they face acceptance problems for such reasons as lacking user focus and relevance. This paper looks at the concept of relevance and its potential for and application to mobile cartography. First, theoretical concepts of relevance from other disciplines are studied f...

This chapter analysed the different kinds of mobile map usage and explained the adaptation concept in the field of mobile cartography. It has been demonstrated that the combination of different context dimensions has several advantages over a more one-sided approach as for instance in the case of LBS. The sole use of location as context parameter d...

The availability of high resolution satellite imagery and the increasing amounts of geographic data collections enable exploring geographic phenomena on the base of highly detailed and dense information. Therefore suitable methods for explorative geovisualization (GeoVis) must be developed to emphasize relevant information in the data. This paper f...

Zusammenfassung Der Nutzen mobiler Geovisualisierungsdienste kann erheblich geschmälert werden durch Beeinträchtigungen der Nützlichkeit (utility) oder der Brauchbarkeit (usability). Dieser Beitrag zeigt, wie die Faktoren des Nutzungskontextes die Nützlichkeit und die Brauchbarkeit der Geoinformation auf mobilen Geräten bestimmen. Die kleinen Displ...

Mobile cartography aims at producing appropriate presentations of geographic information for mobile users, for instance in the form of map based mobile services. Major influences come from new technologies like Location Based Services. Due to the small displays of mobile devices and specific mobile usage contexts selecting and presenting only the m...

The progress in the fields of mobile Internet and positioning methods has lead to a plethora of new possibilities for cartography in mobile usage environments. This article describes the main issues of mobile usage situations and mobile user needs. Next it outlines the conceptual framework of mobile cartography and adaptive geovisualisation. The re...

This chapter describes the need for geovisualisation services that support mobile users in their everyday activities. Following an overview of different geoservices the author anylyses the context of mobile geographic information usage which is is the major information source for the personalisation of services. The core of such a personalisation,...

This chapter gives a general introduction into map-based mobile services which are considered as value-added location-based services. Starting from an overview of digital map types, their rapidly growing affordances and required learning efforts, the natures and design constraints of offline screen maps, web maps and mobile maps are comparatively s...

Entwicklungen im Bereich des mobilen Internets und der Positionierungsmethoden führen zu neuen Möglichkeiten für die Kartographie im mobilen Nutzungsumfeld. Allerdings sind die herkömmlichen Ansätze der Internetkartographie nicht ohne weiteres übertragbar. Ebenso bilden Location Based Services zwar eine gute Grundlage für die Entwicklung von mobile...

Gartner, Georg (Hrsg.)

The paper considers the issue of creating a common platform with which to collaborate and coordinate generalisation research. It suggests the timeliness of launching such an initiative based on the desire amongst research institutions to work together, the increasing level of complexity in generalisation research and the broadening demands on resea...

In the context of research cooperation between the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, a number of basic research questions concerned with adaptive geovisualization are investigated. The paper reports the fundamentals on the concept of geo-database ad...

Reichenbacher, T.: Mobile Kartographie und ihre Nutzer – Szenarien adaptiver Visualisierung mobiler Benutzeraktivitäten. In: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartographie (Hrsg.) Visualisierung und Erschließung von Geodaten. Tagungsband zu GEOVIS 2003, Kartographische Schriften, Band 7, 2003, Bonn: Kirschbaum Verlag. p. 111-120

New technologies, such as telecommunication, mobile Internet, and handheld computing devices, offer new chances to the everyday use of geoinformation. The limited resources in a mobile environment, ranging from low CPU and memory to small screens and low network bandwidth, constitute a major problem. Hence, after a brief description of the characte...

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartographie (Hrsg.)

F. Kelnhofer, M. Lechthaler und K. Brunner (Hrsg.)

GISs are moving away from a system for experts to a more widely-used tool for answering spatial-related questions. The dawn of new technologies on the horizon, such as telecommunication, mobile Internet, and handheld computing devices, offers new chances to the everyday use of geoinformation. However, the existing approaches to mobile visualisation...

The dawn of new technologies on the horizon, such as telecommunication, mobile internet, and handheld computing devices, offers new chances to the discipline of cartography. However, existing approaches to mobile cartography mostly have a commercial background and are rather technology centred. This quite narrow view ignores many relevant problems...

Past research in cartographic generalization has shown that algorithmic methods are well suited to handle narrow tasks, but appear to have limited potential so solve the entire generalization process comprehensively. Attempts to use systems based on explicit knowledge representation (e.g., rule-based or expert systems) also had relatively little su...

17th International Cartographic Conference, Barcelona, 1995. p. 2221-2230

Current software for Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and digital cartography suffers from a lack of intelligent generalization tools, mainly due to missing formalization of generalization knowledge. Considering the increasing importance of digital spatial data at different scales, acquisition of generalization knowledge seems to become a pre...