Geovisualization and Geovisual Analytics: The Interdisciplinary Perspective on Cartography

Motivated by the different understanding of the term Geovisualization this contribution starts with a brief summary of the historic development towards the notions of Geovisualization and Geovisual Analytics, working out the missing definiteness of the sub-term “visualization”. A short review on current research topics on Geovisualization reveals that the narrow and strict focus on the exploratory function within Geovisualization (i.e. the hypothesisfree approach) is not pursued in many cases. Instead, analysis processes in its general sense (i.e. based on a given hypothesis) are dominating. Based on these findings, the interdisciplinary interplay between Geovisualization, Cartography and other domains will be pointed out and an alternative terminology will be proposed.