Tailor-made Exploratory Visualization for Statistics Sweden

Abstract

Sweden's statistical databases are maintained by Statistics Sweden and can be accessed free of charge via the Web. We provide an easy-to-use, exploratory visualization application, called that lets users of these databases explore data, construct hypotheses, discover, refine, test knowledge and evaluate results. Our target user group is not restricted to experts, but we want a broader group of analysts to feel comfortable with our human interaction tools. The voluminous high-dimensional nature of the statistical databases calls for high interactive performance and creative integrated information visualization and geovisualization methods. Tailor-made and Web-enabled applications based on layered component thinking are the foundation for our research. We present a development platform approach that, instead of Java, uses Microsoft's .NET framework, which can integrate a wide range of problem-solving components, both computationally and visually. The approach facilitates .NET hierarchical layout management for implementation of dynamic and resizable views in a single coherent GUI window and the Open-Viz data model optimized for efficiency and interactivity in handling large multivariate data sets. We introduce a parallel coordinates browser (PCB) that serves as the control panel for easier identification of multivariate relationships across spatial domains in the choropleth map. The PCB integrates range sliders for both dynamic queries and conditioning that constrains the data displayed to those meeting specified parameters on all attributes in the PCB. Finally, we present a client-side, plug-in architecture that enables a light-weight GeoWizard application to be distributed across the Web to the users of the statistical databases.