Designing a mapping visualization to integrate physical and cyber domains

Abstract

The amount of data easily available to researchers makes observing patterns easier than ever, but certain fields like cyber security face certain specific challenges in the way this data can be represented, due to the ever-increasing amount and frequency of important data. Additionally, there are few visualizations that map data from the cyber domain to the physical domain, making it difficult for researchers to bridge the gap between cyber and physical spheres. This study aims to address some of these deficiencies by creating a prototype that visualizes both the cyber domain and the physical domain, allowing researchers to determine how the data associated with both these domains are connected. The prototype is a real-time mapping visualization that contains several different components and layers, including weather, major transportation hubs, location searches for places and IP addresses, and social network searches and analyses. This project is a proof of concept work to show the different options that can be implemented in mapping software and is intended to be extensible, customizable, and easily learned. After describing my design, I discuss several different options for customization and growth of the system in the future.