Lens-based focus+context visualization techniques for interactive exploration of web-based reachability maps

Abstract

Reachability maps are powerful means to help making location-based decisions, such as choosing convenient sites for subsidiaries or planning vacation trips. Existing visualization approaches, however, introduce drawbacks concerning an effective acquisition of relevant information and an efficient data processing. In this paper, we introduce the first approach known so far to apply focus+context techniques to web-based reachability maps. We therefore propose a real-time enabled combination of an isochrone-based and a network-based representation of travel times obtained from multi-modal routing analysis using interactive lenses. We furthermore present a GPU-accelerated image-based method to compute isochrones based on a travel time-attributed network on client-side and thus achieve reduced data transmission efforts while yielding isochrones of higher precision, compared to generalized geometry-based approaches.