Visualizing uncertainty for geographical information in the global terrorism database

Presenting information on a geopolitical map can offer powerful insight into a problem by leveraging an individual's innate capacity to discover patterns and to use map-related cues to incorporate pre-existing knowledge. This mode of presentation is not without its flaws, however, as the act of placing information at specific coordinates can imply a false sense of the data's geo-spatial certainty. Traditional uncertainty visualization techniques, such as those that change primitive attributes or employ animation, can create large amounts of clutter or actively distract when visualizing geospatially uncertain events within large datasets. To effectively identify geo-spatial trends within the Global Terrorism Database of the START Center, we have developed a novel usage of squarified treemaps that maintains the strengths of traditional map-viewing but incorporates some measure of data verity.