Abstract:

This paper reflects a challenging applied research task to stimulate, at global level, an exchange of best practices through collaborative Geovisual Analytics reasoning. Advanced dynamic web visualization tools introduced help establish progress initiatives at international and sub-national levels aimed at measuring and collaborating through statistical indicators, economic, social and environmental developments and to engage statisticians, academic students and also the public in such activities. Given this global dimension of such a task, the “dream” of building a repository of progress indicators where domain experts, research, education and public users can use Geovisual Analytics tools to compare situations for two or more countries, regions or local communities could be accomplished by National Center for Geovisual Analytics (NCVA) at Linköping University in close collaboration with our research partner OECD. While the benefits of Geovisual Analytics tools are many, it remains a challenge to adapt these dynamic visual tools to the Internet. For example, to support dynamic web-enabled visualization that enables statisticians to explore geospatial and multivariate demographics data from multiple perspectives, discover interesting relationships, share their incremental discoveries with colleagues and finally communicate selected relevant knowledge to others. These discoveries often emerge through the diverse backgrounds and experiences of expert domains and are precious in a creative analytics reasoning process. In this context, we introduce a dynamic web-enabled demonstrator “OECD eXplorer”, a customized tool for interactively analyzing, communicating and collaborating gained insights and discoveries based on a snapshot mechanism that capture, re-use and share task-related explorative events.
We envision that our web-enabled Flash demonstrator OECD eXplorer could encourage the use of advanced Geovisual Analytics science technologies for education and globalization. First because of its easy accessibility on the Internet. Secondly, by enabling the analyst to take a more active role in the discovery process of exploring regional indicators, for example, to identify those regional areas that outperform their country or OECD mean values. Finally, a snapshot mechanism that capture, re-use and share task-related explorative events that facilitate collaborative GeoAnalytics reasoning. Likewise, we expect the tool to increase the interest in and knowledge of regional structures and development patterns among specialist and non-specialist users. Users claim that a sense of analytical reasoning and speed-of-thought interaction is achieved in OECD eXplorer through its ability to dynamically link views, thus see data and communicate through collaborative discoveries. Major achievements in the Geovisual Analytics web-enabled eXplorer and associated GAV Flash toolkit are:
• Introduction of a novel GeoAnalytics framework developed in the object-oriented language ActionScript with 99% deployment to Internet users for dynamic web;
• A proof-of-concept demonstrator OECD eXplorer developed in close collaboration with domain experts from OECD;
• A snapshot mechanism that records the state of an explorative experience (tasks, events, conditioning, views, highlights, colour, etc) and shares insight and constructed knowledge to team members;
Demos are available at: http://ncva.itn.liu.se and www.oecd.org/GOV/regionaldevelopment

Keywords:

collaborative web-enabled geovisualization, geovisual analytics toolkit, oecd regional.