Geo-referenced Information Visualization on Mobile Devices

The number of mobile devices and associated services has recently been growing considerably. This growth has been changing the way people access information. The technological advances of mobile devices offer new op-portunities to areas where geographic data has an important role. PDA, mobile phones and other portable de-vices are increasingly beginning to have location awareness via GPS devices. These continuous improvements have made possible to incorporate graphic visualization applications to show relevant points of interest to the user without extra actions being necessary. However, usability aspects of this interaction need to be correctly studied to persuade users to accept these visualization applications. Furthermore, mobile devices have several limitations when compared to desktop computers and as a consequence visualization applications developed for the desktop cannot be easily ported to mobile environments. Limitations on the screen size restrict the interface area and the number of data elements that can be displayed. Additionally, limitations on the memory size, proc-essor, graphics hardware and connectivity further reduce the performance hindering the development of com-plex applications. In this paper we describe an ongoing research that aims to design solutions for the visualiza-tion of geographic data on mobile devices. An initial research on similar applications has already been done and as a result the architecture for a geo-referenced visualization application has been defined. In the future, a prototype based on this architecture will be developed which will allow us to test different visualization tech-niques, filtering mechanisms and adequate representations for the users search results