Informed Omnivore

This project proposal presents Informed Omnivore, an exploratory analysis tool for visualizing the size and growth of the Canadian organic food industry. A goal of this application is to provide consumers with the information necessary to make informed choices when buying organic food. This proposal contains a description of the domain, task, and data, followed by a planned information visualization solution. The proposal concludes with a related work section and an overview of the author's personal expertise and motivation. DESCRIPTION The proposed information visualization application, Informed Omnivore, will address information within the agricultural domain, specifically with regards to organic food production. The application will support the task of exploring an agricultural landscape, providing the user with information such as food type and production levels at provincial and regional scales. The goal of this task is to create informed consumers, allowing them to make sustainable and healthy food choices. Preliminary sources of data for this application will be adapted from two sources: the Canadian 2006 census of agriculture [10], and recent organic food production data published by Canadian Organic Growers [7]. Secondary tasks and sources of data are discussed in the future work section. PROPOSED SOLUTION The proposed implementation will permit a provincial and regional geo-spatial exploration of the Canadian organic food industry, displaying a variety of food types along with current and historical production levels. Data published by Canadian Organic Growers [7] contains detailed information of this nature at the national and provincial levels, while the census data contains information at the scale of townships or counties [10]. The application will likely contain several linked primary and secondary panels or views. A main cartographic panel will include interactive navigation controls for panning and zooming. A food type panel will contain a categorical list of food items. Several secondary panels will contain relevant production level information based on region and food type selected, and will allow for comparisons to be made between selections in the primary panels. These panels will support filtering and brushing interactions, such that filtering by food type will highlight regions in the cartographic view which produce the selected type of food(s). Selecting a region will conversely highlight food types grown in that region in the food types panel. An example of this is given in the following scenarios of use, and is illustrated in the attached design sketches (see Figures 1 and 2). Scenario of Use A typical scenario of use for Informed Omnivore is determining what organic food types are grown in the area local to the user, and comparing production levels between these food types. A user navigates the national map by panning and zooming the cartographic panel, and selects a province (see Figure 1). The subset of organic food types produced in this province are highlighted in the food type panel (or, conversely, food types not produced in this province are filtered out). The user may now compare provincial production levels of the highlighted food types by selecting them; corresponding data will populate the secondary data panels. The user also has the option to drill down farther by selecting the regional view of a province; the process of locating and selecting a region is then