Add motion maps to your Webi reports

Hi all,

Earlier this year, the new version of Galigeo G16 was released complete with many new features.

For those not familiar, Galigeo for Webi is a product that allows the inclusion of any kind of map in your Webi reports.

It behaves like other Webi components by consuming the queries of the report. The data is automatically transformed into geographic objects so these can be visualized directly on a map. Authors can then define many types of symbol representations (cloropleth, proportional symbols, pie charts, icons, labels, etc…) in order to highlight their indicators.

Having all the information displayed on a map can be really helpful to understand the data. For example we can detect in the blink of an eye whether a territory is correctly covered or not, which zones are abandoned and where hot spots are.

Now, I’d like to focus on one of the new great features, Motion Maps.

Galigeo goes a step further by adding time based information to the visualization. Working with motion maps is very simple and is outlined as follows:

1. Select a dimension in your query
2. Animate the map against that dimension

For example this screenshot below shows the monthly evolution of store revenue. Click the play button and the map is animated like a movie. Users can also navigate manually within the time period they are interested in observing in more detail.

Same thing in video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAfH655oog

Something even more fun is to represent some indicators using a heatmap. Combining this type of visualization with motion maps will allow the user to view their data in a way that resembles familiar with the TV weather forecast.

To see this sort of map, the Webi report requires two specific dimensions:

• A geographic dimension. This dimension can be any information that provides a clue on the localization of a record: a zipcode, a pair of lat/long, a city name
• A time dimension. Anything that represents time and can be ordered: time, date, period, etc…

For every object on the map, what we see is the combination of these two dimensions according to the position of the Motion Maps player.

Here is an example of data that is appropriate for motion maps:

(The “zone” value can be a zipcode for example)

With this type of data, the indicator can be represented on the map using a range of colors. Launching the motion maps on year will animate that dimension. All along users can see the evolution of the indicator in space and time.

If you want to try it out, you can download the application here: Galigeo for WebIntelligence: Location mapping software

I hope you found this article interesting!

Ganaël