Flowstrates: An approach for visual exploration of temporal origin-destination data

Abstract

Many origin-destination datasets have become available in the recent years, e.g. flows of people, animals, money, material, or network traffic between pairs of locations, but appropriate techniques for their exploration still have to be developed. Especially, supporting the analysis of datasets with a temporal dimension remains a significant challenge. Many techniques for the exploration of spatio-temporal data have been developed, but they prove to be only of limited use when applied to temporal origin-destination datasets.We present Flowstrates, a new interactive visualization approach in which the origins and the destinations of the flows are displayed in two separate maps, and the changes over time of the flow magnitudes are represented in a separate heatmap view in the middle. This allows the users to perform spatial visual queries, focusing on different regions of interest for the origins and destinations, and to analyze the changes over time provided with the means of flow ordering, filtering and aggregation in the heatmap. In this paper, we discuss the challenges associated with the visualization of temporal origin-destination data, introduce our solution, and present several usage scenarios showing how the tool we have developed supports them. © 2011 The Author(s).