VIS-STAMP: A Visualization System for Space-Time and Multivariate Patterns

VIS-STAMP is a geo-visual analytic software package that couples computational, visual, and cartographic methods for exploring and understanding spatio-temporal and multivariate data. It can help analysts investigate complex patterns across multivariate, spatial, and temporal dimensions via clustering, sorting, and visualization. Specifically, VIS-STAMP builds on a self-organizing map, a parallel coordinate plot, several forms of reorderable matrices , and a geographic small multiple display.

Related Publication: 
  • Guo, D., J. Chen, A. M. MacEachren, and K. Liao (2006), "A Visualization System for Spatio-Temporal and Multivariate Patterns (VIS-STAMP)", IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 12(6), pp. 1461-1474. 
  • Guo, D. and M. Gahegan (2006). "Spatial Ordering and Encoding for Geographic Data Mining and Visualization", Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 27(3), pp.243-266.
  • Guo, D., K. Liao, M. Morgan (2007). "Visualizing Patterns in a Global Terrorism Incident Database", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. 34, pp. 767-784.
  • Jin, H. & D. Guo. (2009) "Understanding Climate Change Patterns with Multivariate Geovisualization". In Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops, 217-222. Miami, FL, USA: IEEE Press.

Java is needed to run the following software. You can verify if Java is already installed on your computer at this link: http://java.com/en/download/installed.jsp.

AttachmentSize
vis-stamp manual1013.59 KB
visstamp_sampledata.zip186.02 KB
visstamp.jar6.33 MB

Comments

Q/A on opening data files

Submitted by Diansheng Guo on 07/20/2011.

Question from a user:

"when i select States.shp ,  vis-stamp gives me an message that it can not open the csv file"


Answer:

VIS-STAMP will ask you to open two files (in the following sequence, with two dialogs, which come one after another, look similar, but ask for different files):

  • First, it asks you to open the shape file (containing spatial objects such as states). For this dialog, choose "States.shp";
  • Second, it asks you to open the space-time-attribute data file (which is a csv file). For this dialog, choose "crime_rates_1960_2007.csv";
There should not be any problem with the above two steps--just make sure choose the right file for each of the two dialogs. 

Data Input for VIS-STAMP

Submitted by Diansheng Guo on 03/17/2011.

You may organize your data differently to examine patterns from different perspectives. For example, the space-time-attribute data file (such as the crime_rates_1960_2007.csv file in the sample data) can be organized as:

state, year, crimeType1, crimeType2, ....

or 

state, crimeTypes, year1, year2, ...

With the former you can look at the crime profile for each state and how it changes over time. With the latter you can look at the temporal trend for each state and how the trends are different from different crime types. 

The materials distributed on this website since 2008 are based upon work partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0748813. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).