Informed Spatial Decision Making Using Coordinated Views

According to a commonly accepted view, the process of decision making comprises three major phases: intelligence (situation analysis and problem recognition), design (finding possible variants of problem solution), and choice (evaluation of the options and selection of the most appropriate ones). It is widely recognised that exploratory data visualisation is very helpful during the first phase of the decision making process while the other phases require different software tools. In particular, the choice phase is typically supported by various computational methods that find appropriate trade-offs among multiple conflicting criteria taking into account user-specified priorities. Visualisation plays a limited role: in the best case, it is used to represent the final results of the computations. We argue that conscious, well-substantiated choice requires a more extensive use of exploratory visualisation facilities, which need to be properly coordinated with the computational multi-criteria decision support methods. Extremely important is a high degree of user interactivity, which allows the user to probe the robustness and quality of computationally-derived solutions. We suggest several mechanisms for linking and coordinating visual exploratory tools with two types of computational methods differing in the sort of output they produce. We demonstrate the use of this dynamic link with an example of a real spatially-related decision problem