Hok-Ling Christopher Au-Yeung

The paper provides an evaluation of geovisualization techniques for use within retail decision-making applications. 'Geovisualization' represents a new area of visualization research, and challenges the conventional mapping approaches used in present-day retail planning. Due to technological developments, computer-based mapping has become increasingly interactive, and users can now explore and mine the third and fourth dimensions of their spatial data sets. The research presents the findings from the development and evaluation of a retail geovisualization application. The changing dynamics of the retail landscape of the Greater Toronto Area were used as the study area for the prototype application. A small number of retail practitioners participated in the evaluation process. The retail panel indicated that visualization offers significant potential to enhance decision-making activities. However, current geovisualization techniques require substantial improvements in functionality before they can be integrated into organizational decision-making. It is envisaged that over time these technologies will become standard decision support tools as both research and technology develop in this emerging research area.