This article gives us a detailed introduction about Geovisualization. The author started by giving out reasons about whys should we care about Geovisualization. In short, I think the explanation would be that people can get knowledge from it by transforming the geospatial referenced data into information and turn the information into knowledge by analysing it. One example would be the switching from data to paper maps, and then paper maps to web-based maps. The visualization is advancing overtime, so researcher can get more out of a geospatial dataset. How much can we get from the dataset are largely depends on the visualizing techniques.
Then, the author introduced some issues that still remains in the geovisualization field. These problems are representation, visualization-computation integration, interface design, and cognition-usability. One issue I noticed about representation is that in order to take full advantage of the information we want to give out in the geospatial dataset, we want to personalized representation as much as possible. One example I can think of is about Google Map. When I’m trying to find certain stores in a big shopping mall, I always find it hard to locate a certain floor and the direction since sometimes there is no detailed information about this represented on the map. However, I find some other map application gives about 3D navigations in shopping mall so user will find it very easy to locate a certain store. Obviously, the latter application gets more out of the mall database, and make the navigation process more personalized.