FAIR Geovisualizations: Definitions, Challenges, and the Road Ahead
This addresses the need for standardized FAIR principles in geovisualizations for researchers and practitioners working with online geographic information, but it is incremental as it builds on existing FAIR concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of making geovisualizations FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) due to the growing amount of such visualizations on the web, proposing a framework and identifying open research questions from computer, analyst, and developer perspectives.
The availability of open data and of tools to create visualizations on top of these open datasets have led to an ever-growing amount of geovisualizations on the Web. There is thus an increasing need for techniques to make geovisualizations FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. This article explores what it would mean for a geovisualization to be FAIR, presents relevant approaches to FAIR geovisualizations and lists open research questions on the road towards FAIR geovisualizations. The discussion is done using three complementary perspectives: the computer, which stores geovisualizations digitally; the analyst, who uses them for sensemaking; and the developer, who creates them. The framework for FAIR geovisualizations proposed, and the open questions identified are relevant to researchers working on findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable online visualizations of geographic information.