Integrating geographic and information visualization for interactive exploration of statistical data

Abstract: The fast growing quantity of statistical data with geographical reference, accessible on the Web, creates a growing demand for more powerful exploratory analysis techniques for investigation of socio-economic phenomena in association with their geographical location. Statistics Sweden provides large amounts of census data of economic, social, demographic, and other matters of interest to the governments, government departments, local authorities, businesses, and to the general public. The current techniques available to analyze these data sets are limited. Therefore, this diploma work was put together, with the intention of integrating methods used in geographic visualization and information visualization into a prototype tool for interactive exploration of statistical data. This report investigates the tools present today and describes the development of a new one called GeoWizard - a tailor-made easy-to-use application for Statistics Sweden's databases.