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

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.