Visualization of an Air Quality Measurement Network

Abstract

A basic task of environmental protection is the monitoring of the current environmental state. Although wishablefor most of the environmental parameters, it is not possible to make the monitoring process continually for everything. From the three basic media: air, water and ground, only for the air has continually monitoring widely been achieved within the last years.

An air quality measurement network measures a set of air quality parameters distributed over a state or a country. The measurement data are stored in databases for actual decisions and long term observations. Visualization techniques are used to compare the dynamic behaviour of different parameters and the spatial behaviour of the pollutants.

An air quality measurement network is a highly distributed technical systems. The validity of measurement data depends on the technical state of the stations and their interfaces to measurement instruments and of the measurement instruments themselves. That’s why the technical background is important for the visualization system.

This paper descibes the design approach for a user interface for the air quality measurement network of the Austrian federal state Kärnten. The measurement network has been built by Seibersdorf Austria. The system currently used for the user interface is a visualization tool (Dataviews). As visualization systems actually do not have capabilities like user interface management systems (UIMS) to build flexible dialogues, it is difficult or expensive to integrate technical background information into the visualization.

The work presented has been done in the context of our cooperations at the computer graphics group in Kaiserslautern. Having had many experiences in the design of user interfaces for complex dynamic systems, we worked out a new design, which is based on an object-oriented mental model. The prototype has been implemented using the KGT-Toolkit, which is based on theXAVIA visualization architecture.