Implementation and Evaluation of a Flow Map Demonstrator for Analyzing Work Commuting Flows between Norway and Sweden

GeoViz: Linking Geovisualization with Spatial Analysis and Modeling, 10-11 March 2011, Hamburg, Germany

Quan Ho, Hai-Phong Nguyen, Mikael Jern

“Statistics visualization facilitating methods from the geovisual analytics research domain has recently gained interest. Global, national and even sub-national statistics foundations have started to migrate from tabular representations to interactive web-enabled visualization that show trends. Flow map statistics, however, visualizing quantities of trade, transport or migration is still rare. This paper covers spatial interactions for a wide variety of realized movements of people such as commuting and migration between an origin and a destination. This type of flow data can be visually expressed by directed weighted arrows over a geographic space. For a small number and properly distributed regions directed arrow symbols can be an attractive means of visualization. Cartographic flow maps showing official statistics related to a larger number of sub-national regions (e.g. counties and municipalities) are still problematic and often skewed and detailed which leads to cluttered flows where important details are obscured. In this paper, we introduce an interactive flow map demonstrator that effectively can explore reasonable large spatio-temporal and multivariate statistical flow datasets using bidirectional flow arrows where both in- and outflows can be clearly shown.”

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