Week 7: Visualisation for Knowledge Management

The lecture and seminar will be led by William Wong.

One of the key aspects of knowledge is understanding the relationships between pieces of information and the representation of the dynamics between entities in an area of interest. For instance, in air traffic control, it is not good enough to know that there are aircraft flying in an airspace. It is essential to know their positions relative to each other, and to other entities in that part of the airspace, in order to achieve minimum safety separations. In emergency ambulance dispatching, ambulance controllers need to know where their ambulances are in relation to emergencies and incidents in order to assess priorities and determine which vehicles are the closest available. In medicine, we are concerned with how the body state is affected by localised events such as a stab wound, or by medication that changes the body biochemical balances. In this module, we draw on the field of cognitive engineering, human factors, human-computer interaction, scientific visualisation, to present concepts and principles that guide the elicitiation and representation of dynamic processes that need to be visualised, and their impact on reading, interpretation, sense-making, situation awareness, and decision-making.