Visualization Patterns for Cultural Landscapes

As a result of advancing digitalization, an enormous amount of heterogeneous information concerning cultural landscapes is available on the internet. Unfortunately, many cultural heritage websites display just distinct phenomena of particular landscapes and fail to outline the characteristics of the cultural landscapes themselves. Together, such web resources form an information pyramid without a concise but comprehensive introduction into “their” cultural landscapes at the top. We identify a few categories of information needs that users of cultural heritage websites may have. We propose rich internet applications (RIAs) as a solution to produce the missing pyramid’s top level. This paper describes a few basic genres that facilitate the composition of RIAs for cultural landscapes and identifies three main visualization patterns in which the content of such RIAs can be arranged.Each pattern is related to a set of common user interface components (widgets), which play different roles depending on the context in which they are used. While the design methodology of RIAs is still in its infancy, information analysis in terms of these visualization patterns is worth considering.