Implementation of a Flow Map Demonstrator for Analyzing Commuting and Migration Flow Statistics Data

Abstract

The interest for statistics visualization is emerging with the rise of geovisual analytics on the internet. National and sub-national statistics foundations have started to migrate from tabular representations to interactive web-enabled visualizations that can show trends. Interactive web-enable visualizations for movement data (or flow data) such as trade flows or commuting flows, however, are still rare. This paper covers spatial interactions and animation for a wide variety of realized movements of people such as commuting and migration between an origin and a destination visually expressed by directed weighted arrows over a geographic space. The paper is built around an interactive flow map demonstrator that can interactively explore and communicate large spatio-temporal and multivariate statistical flow datasets using bidirectional flow arrows where both in-coming and out-going flows can be clearly shown coordinated and linked with a choropleth map, histogram or parallel coordinates plot. The demonstrator is implemented with low-level components from our geovisual analytics toolkit GAV Flash designed with the intention to shorten the time and effort needed to develop customized web-enabled interactive visualization applications such as the introduced flow map application.