A web-enabled visualization toolkit for geovisual analytics

We introduce a framework and class library (GAV Flash) implemented in Adobe’s ActionScript, designed with the intention to significantly shorten the time and effort needed to develop customized web-enabled applications for visual analytics or geovisual analytics tasks. Through an atomic layered component architecture, GAV Flash provides a collection of common geoand information visualization representations extended with motion behavior including scatter matrix, extended parallel coordinates, table lens, choropleth map and treemap, integrated in a multiple, timelinked layout. Versatile interaction methods are drawn from many data visualization research areas and optimized for dynamic web visualization of spatio-temporal and multivariate data. Based on layered component thinking and the use of programming interface mechanism the GAV Flash architecture is open and facilitates the creation of new or improved versions of existing components so that ideas can be tried out or optimized rapidly in a fully functional environment. Following the Visual Analytics mantra, a mechanism “snapshot” for saving the explorative results of a reasoning process is developed that aids collaboration and publication of gained insight and knowledge embedded as dynamic visualizations in blogs or web pages with associative metadata or “storytelling”.