Themes for the next four years

Finally I’ve managed to send in my application for the PhD study program which I’m going to attend. I’ve been employed as a PhD Research fellow since August 1, however that is isolated from the study which I’m going to embark on and which will be my main concern and interest the next four years.

Applying for the PhD study program involves filling out a rigorous page-up and page down form of more or less useless information (i.e. what’s your name) – of course I see the necessity. A part from that, some parts are of more interest. A description of the project as well as a preliminary schedule is supposed to be made, involving milestones and similar and a plan for the obligatory courses to attend. My fellowship was an open project so the project outline was designed and written by me in cooperation with my supervisor (Terje Midtbø). Naturally I’ve put a decent effort into writing this, and as I’m very eager at others involving themselves in the project as well as the fact that my work is funded indirectly from the government, I’m publishing the project outline here, as well as a short, less academic, version of hit:) Hopefully this public, non-academic, dissemination will continue during my studies publishing projects, issues and results.

The project focus on applying and integrating map visualization techniques in uncommon domains such as large enterprises. Due to my previous collaboration with the COSTT project the enterprise in question will primarily be hospitals. However a general notion and applicability will hopefully be kept in at least some projects. If you’re still reading you may find yourself asking; “Maps in hospitals? That doesn’t make sense?”. Well, yes, it doesn’t. At least not conventional topographic maps (i.e. city maps, road maps etc). However, it is believed that position information may be a crucial part of both enabling easier coordination and collaboration support, as well as an enabler for “context-sensitive” systems. So, the notion of maps will not be of a conventional type.  Maps or “Visual communication of (spatial) information” is going to be the main focus. However, in order to communicate information one need to have some information to communicate. As such the project will also touch upon what information exists or can be generated as well as look on how this information can be filtered to only communicate the “right” information. These relations as well as an overall view of the project’s themes are depicted in figure 1.

Figure 1: Project themes and their relations

The project outlined is of a fairly general kind and it is intended to be. However, I envisage that my focus will be on elements that affect indoor cartography (what makes a good map indoors – and in which situations?). As well I will be probably be doing something in trying to integrate/apply different geovisual analytics methods into the hospital domain. This autumn I currently have two projects; A literature review on Indoor Positioning, Indoor Cartography and Use of position data in hospitals. The second project is on Semi Static Cartographic Animations – which I probably will be posting some more on soon.

So you’re still reading? Then I hope sincerely that I managed to explain what I’m going to do in my project – at least roughly. If not, post a comment and yell at me!

If you’re still interested in my project you will find the complete project outline here: http://docs.eksplisitt.net/

Del gjerne med andre!

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