A web-enabled visualization toolkit for geovisual analytics

Abstract

A framework and class library (GAV Flash) implemented in Adobe’s ActionScript is introduced, designed with the intention to significantly shorten the time and effort needed to develop customized web-enabled applications for geovisual analytics tasks. Through an atomic-layered component architecture, GAV Flash provides a collection of interactive geographic and information visualization representations for exploring high-dimensional spaces that are extended with motion behaviour. Versatile interaction methods are drawn from many data visualization research areas and optimized for dynamic web visualization of spatio-temporal and multivariate data. Based on layered-component thinking and the use of programming interface mechanism, the GAV Flash architecture is open and facilitates the creation of new or improved versions of existing components so that ideas can be tried out or optimized rapidly in a fully functional environment. GAV Flash is not only a tool for interactive visualization, it also supports storytelling around visual analytics in which visual representations serve not only as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a means to share stories among users fostering a social style of collaborative data analysis. A mechanism ‘snapshot’ for saving the explorative results of a reasoning process is introduced, which aids collaboration and publication of gained insight and knowledge embedded as dynamic visualizations in blogs or web pages with associative metadata or ‘storytelling’.