Paper Review

“Geospatial Big Data and Cartography : Research Challenges and Opportunities

for Making Maps that Matter”
Praditya Mukti Ali

Introduction
Representation of big data is a challenge for carthographer nowadays.
Cartographer takes place of generalizing this complex world into maps trough some
steps. Big data have been highlighted in recent years in many disciplines and number of
researches have been conducted. All the researchers and experts comes from many
disciplines that connected each other over cartographic and big data context, such as
computer science, human-computer interaction, game design, VR, Information
visualization, data mining and visualarts.
Geospatial big data divided into two categories; geolocalized data (location as an
attribute) and spatially grounded data (location and other information are linked). They
are five themes as the main topic discussed by the cartographic’s experts about geospatial
big data. The first theme is place, space and time as a frame to understanding
cartographic complexity of representing the big data. The second is how to simplify and
highlighting the the main information over space and time, we called as representation.
The third is interaction that very important for users to navigate, search, filter, and
compare based on geographic data source. The fourth is scale or relationship between
distance in maps and their corresponding ground distance on the field. The fifth is a
major goal to make users understand the geospatial big data presented and the context
displayed on the map they read.
Challenges of Geospatial Big Data
As written above, geospatial big data is a challenge for cartographic researches.
There are several challenge about cartography and geospatial big data that categorized
into six points.
The first category is about making sense of geospatial big data. It’s mean how to
find inherent information on big data to make sense of big data. The first challenge is
cartographers needs to focus on tools that help people reason about what they are seeing.
Second, cartograoher has to design effective map-based interfaces to support long-term
analytical engagement with complex spatiotemporal problems and geospatial big data.
Third, cartographer have to develop new approaches for supporting collaborative decision
making using the map as a mutual interface on any interfaces, using cloud-computing,
AR and VR appliances, and other advancements. Next, cartographers have to undertand
when, how, and if maps helps user understand the geospatial big data.
 The second category is volume that refers to the data size. Cartographers should
undertand how to find the most effective methods for creating overviews of geospatial
data and they have to develop the methhods that embody the volume and highlight the
most important aspects of geospatial data.
The third category is variety or data heterogenity. The geospatial big data is lie in
different formats and representations. As mention above geospatial big data represent the
complex world into maps, so a map has to be designed in the best cartographic interfaces
that can handle the complexity of geospatial big data. Time is now referred as an item of
cartographic besides space and place, so cartograher researchers have to develop
technique for understanding change over time and period in geospatial big data and also
make a new approaches to design a predictive analitycs of dynamic phenomena with
maps. Still about time, they have to develop spatiotemporal visualization methods for
geospatial big data that support a variety of uses and users.
Then, the fourth category is about geospatial big data velocity, or the speed at
which geospatial data are generated and at which they should be analyzed. The first
challenges is how to develop methods that increase the velocity of geospatial big data
analysis and used in some circumtances that needs velocity to analyze geospatial big data
immediately. Next, researchers have to develop a maps that provide an interface that
responsible on the important changes in dynamic geospatial big data resources.
The fifth category is veracity or the reability of the data in terms of precision and
other aspects of uncertainty. Here cartographer have to be able to characterize the quality
and certainty of geospatial data that they put on their maps. Beside characterize the data,
cartographer can also develop approaches for visualizing the quality and certainty of
geospatial big data.
The last category is about art and geospatial big data. There are many reasons to
explore artistic methods to visualize and undertanding the geospatial big data. to explore
the artistic of geospatial visualization, researcher have to encourage and maximize
creative contributions for expressing geospatial big data. Then, the artistic methods and
techniques for representing geospatial big data have to be booked on library.
Cartographer also have to find the way to generate the artistic renderings, semi-auto
renderings, or fully-aouto renderings of geospatial big data so that the conventional
geospatial big data representations dynamically linked with artworks.
Research Opportunities for Cartography and Geospatial Big Data
In this section will highlight key research opportunities in the category of visual,
computational, and artistic methods. Some of opportunities from the challenges above is
not included as an opportunity because they seems can be solved in the near time.
 The first opportunity of visual method for geospatial big data is evaluating
systematically the existing visual method of thematic cartography in a smaller scope then
link them to the bigger scope of data rather than focused on developing new visual
methods. The next opportunity is how to adapt cartographic generalization principles
and techniques to support visual analysis of geospatial big data, include the number of
spatial phenomenon occurences and the variation of their spatial density and accuracy.
The next opportunity is how to adapt couple computational methods and cartographic
representation best practices into an automated framework that suggests appropriate
designs decisions on the fly for geospatial big data.
Computational methods for geospatial big data are needed to uncover underlying
patterns or structure on maps. The key of this part is how to apply what we used to
analyze the world complexity into algorithm or computations in the making of maps or
using the maps. The first opportunity is encrease the knowledge about patterns across
scales in the development od new computational methods for geospatial big data. New
efforts should be made to integrate computational and visual methods that can help
develop new side of view into geospatial big data. The next is how to use what we know
about human dynamics to find patterns in geospatial big data. The last opportunity in
computational method is how to connect concepts form complexity science rather than
conventional science or Newonian science to new visual analytics methods for geospatial
big data.
Not only as a challenge, adapting artistic for geospatial big data is also presenting
some opportunities. To create an artistic geospatial language, they have to facilitate
engagement of artists with geospatial big data or make collaborations between artists and
scientists. The second opportunity is co-opt artistic methods and techniques to represent
geospatial big data. The third and fourth opportunities are the contunuity from the
challenges of adapting artistic for geospatial big data; how to generating artistic
renderings of geospatial big data and link artworks to conventional representations in a
visual analytics context to leverage geospatial big data.
Conclusions
Geospatial big data brings some challenges and opportunities into researcher and
cartographer to overcome the geospatial big data that changes rapidly. Some of the
challenges could be solved in the short time, meanwhile some of them becoming
opportunities on the development of cartography.