Abstract
Situation maps play an important role in planning and decision making in emergency response centers. Important information such as operating units or hazards is usually shown on these maps. Arranging the huge amount of in-formation can be challenging for operators, as this information should always be visible while not occluding im-portant regions of the underlying geographic map. As large interactive whiteboards are increasingly replacing tradition-al analog maps, new ways to assist with arranging information can be provided. In this paper, we present a new approach for placing annotations automatically on top of a map. For finding the optimal placement, our metrics are based on geographic features, on the users' sketched input, and on the annotations geometry itself. Moreover, we also added additional features to minimize occlusions for multiple annotations. First results were highly promising and showed that our approach improves input performance while keeping an optimal view of the map. © 2013 ACM.