DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN INTERACTIVE VISUAL QUERYING SYSTEM FOR MARITIME DATA

Abstract

Automatic Identification System (AIS) data is a crucial foundation of maritime operations such as navigation, traffic management, and safety monitoring. This requires robust management, visualization, and interactive visual analytics systems for the operators. Maritime data analytics is an open-ended problem. Moreover, the increasing volume and complexity of data make it essential to incorporate the latest advancements in user interaction and analytics. These advancements are necessary to handle the challenges effectively, ensuring operators can make timely and informed decisions. This research explores the design and implementation of a novel system architecture for maritime data querying and exploration, enabling enhanced user interactions through direct manipulation techniques. This system architecture provides a collaborative environment that incorporates Mixed Reality (MR), a touchable table-top interface, as well as iterative design and evaluation of a graph-based Visual Query Builder (VQB). The aim of developing the VQB interface is to allow non-experts to explore and query maritime data without the need to have technical skills while enhancing the decision-making process and spatial awareness of maritime operations. This research further evaluates the VQB interface in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and user preferences by conducting a user study. For this study, we developed a baseline web-based textual interface for SPARQL queries, enhanced with auto-correction features and additional spatial querying capabilities, to effectively measure and fairly compare the performance of the VQB interface. 20 students from the faculty of computer science participated in this study without prior knowledge of RDF data querying and SPARQL language. Overall, the results of this study were promising as it showed a higher efficiency and accuracy rate as well as less perceived workload among participants in the VQB interface compared to the baseline. These findings highlight the role of visual query interfaces in improving the user experience as well as elevating efficiency, especially for non-experts, allowing them to explore and query maritime data without the need to learn technical skills.