The ICA Commission on GeoVisualisation chaired by Gennady Andrienko (Fraunhofer Institute, Germany) has been active in promoting, monitoring and developing contemporary ­methods of visualisation and visual analysis using geospatial data and cartographic principles. An interesting and stimulating workshop entitled ‘GeoVisualisation of Dynamics, Movement and Change’ was held at the AGILE conference in Girona, Spain, in May 2008.

More than forty people participated. Twenty presentations were given during four sessions. The first covered analytical methods for movement, the second, movement patterns, the third, events and time series, and the fourth other types of spatio-tem­poral data. All papers are available at the workshop website. A special issue of Information Visualization published in August 2008 will present the highlights.

Utah
How to portray movement was the focus of one of the papers presented in Girona, ‘Taking a Systematic Look at Movement’ by Somayeh Dodge, Robert Weibel and Anna-Katharina Lautenschütz from the University of Zurich. To develop their ideas further they have also launched a new WiKi (a collaborative website acting as a forum for discussion) to assist in developing taxonomy of movement patterns. A further meeting under the auspices of the ICA Commission is the workshop on Geospatial Visual Analytics to be held in Utah, USA, in September. This workshop is run in conjunction with the ­GIScience2008 conference, and a special issue of the journal Cartography and GIS (CAGIS) will be published in 2009, based on the material presented.

VisMaster
Several commission members are involved in a recently approved EU-funded project called ‘VisMaster: Visual Analytics – Mastering the Information Age’. The major goal of this co-ordination action (CA) is to promote visual analytics at European level and prepare a basis for EU-funded R&D projects related to this field.

A Working Group on Spatial and Temporal Aspects is being co-ordinated by the commission chair, with the participation of the University of Rostock (H. Schumann), the University of Pisa (D. Pedresci), City University (J. Dykes), the University of Zürich (S. Fabrikant and R. Weibel), and ITC (M-J. Kraak). The main activity of the working group will be an expert workshop (to be organised in 2009) followed by collecting and summarising its results for the Visual Analytics research roadmap. It is expected that a significant proportion of the future work of the commission will be invested in this work package.