“Visualising the project landscape”: a spatialisation describing workload attributes as terrain

Spatialisations, the products of rendering non-spatial concepts in (typically, map and landscape) spatial representations, have been effectively applied to news stories and project workload. The latter has previously been implemented in a Virtual Geographic Environment (VGE) using a landscape metaphor. This was done by translating the work attributes of duration to landscape area and difficulty to the height of elevated features in the landscape, to produce a simple scene. This work proposes and implements an extension of the workload 2.5D terrain surface (landscape) based on the additional work attributes of project uncertainty (translating to terrain roughness), and relative importance of the project (translating to centrality of the project area in the entire scene). Importantly, each project is divided into subtasks, each possessing its own duration, difficulty, certainty and importance which translates into a correspondingly more detailed and realistic hill in the virtual environment. This implementation visualizes projects and their subtasks as ‘islands’ with ‘hills’, each generated from objectively-defined (duration and definition of subtasks) and subjective (difficulty, certainty, importance) data. Results on several types of data (workload-related and non-workload related) are presented to demonstrate the data independence of the closed computational algorithm. This represents a novel application for the VGE, featuring a non-specific naïve geography rather than the usual specific virtual environment that is tied to a real location. Finally, limitations to the computational method are reported on and proposals for future development are presented (e.g. the modelling of semantic proximity of projects).