A web-enabled Geovisual Analytics tool applied to OECD Regional Data

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 countries, therefore, has increased in importance in the policy agenda of many countries. In this paper, we introduce “OECD eXplorer” – an interactive tool for analyzing and communicating gained insights and discoveries about spatial-temporal and multivariate OECD regional data. This database 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. 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 web-compliant Geovisual Analytics toolkit that supports a broad collection of functional components for analysis and validation, hypothesis generation, communicating and finally collaborating gained insights and knowledge based on a snapshot mechanism that captures, re-uses and shares task-related explorative events. An important ambition is to develop a generic highly interactive web “eXplorer” platform that can be the foundation for easy customization of similar dynamic web applications using different geographical boundaries and indicators and be publicly available. Given this global dimension, the dream of building a repository “statistical Wiki” of progress indicators, where experts and public users can use these generic tools to compare situations for two or more countries, regions or local communities, could be accomplished.