Recent advances in web-enabled graphics technologies have the potential to make a dramatic impact on developing highly interactive Geovisual Analytics applications for the Internet. An emerging and challenging application domain is geovisualization of regional (sub-national) statistics. Higher integration driven by institutional processes and economic globalisation is eroding national borders and creating competition along regional lines in the world market. Sound information at sub-national level and benchmarking of regions across borders, therefore, has increased in importance in the policy agenda of many countries.
Regional statistics is a potential treasure chest for policy-makers, researchers and citizens to gain a better understanding of a region's structure and performance and to carry out analysis of territorial trends and disparities based on sound information comparable across countries or counties. Many approaches and tools have been developed in spatial-related knowledge discovery but generally they do not scale well with dynamic visualization of larger spatial data on the Internet. In this context, we introduce a dynamic web-enabled platform "eXplorer", a customized tool for interactively analyzing, communicating and collaborating gained insights and based on NCVA´s toolkit GAV Flash. It includes a snapshot and story mechanism that captures, re-uses and shares findings. The key feature of eXplorer is its deployment to Internet users for dynamic web. The first version of eXplorer was released in November 2008 on the OECD web-site. Several extended versions has been released that enhances the possibility to explore trends over time, provides novel functions for presenting stories about the statistics and combines metadata and maps status. The latest version of eXplorer includes tools for the communication of results on the basis of a snapshot and storytelling mechanism that captures, re-uses and shares task-related explorative findings.
Further developments during 2009 have resulted in the creation of a generic highly interactive web eXplorer platform Open eXplorer that is the foundation for easy customization of similar eXplorer web applications using different geographical boundaries and indicators. Given this global dimension, a "generic eXplorer" will become a powerful tool to explore different territorial dimensions (countries, regions, cities, rural areas) according to the different needs of users.
More information about the research and technology behind eXplorer is available here. Have a look at the film on information visualization to get a brief introduction on the subject. |
