The Visual Analytics project aims at solving the Mini Challenge 2 of the VAST Challenge 2021, a Visual Analytics competition designed to help researchers develop software for a variety of analytics tasks. The objective of this challenge is to identify the identities and behaviours of the employees of the GAStech International, a Kronos-based company settled in the fictional city of Abila. Through the Interactive Dashboard It is possible to recognize the most frequent locations visited by the employees, as well as typical patterns and issues of concern, analysing their transactions and car movements on Abila’s territory during a two-week period in January 2014.
The visualization project has been carried out exploiting Vue, a component-based framework for building user interfaces built on top of HTML, CSS and Javascript, in its 3.2 version. For this reason, it was also used Bootstrap Vue 3, a Vue integrated version of the front-end toolkit which utilizes prebuilt components to help building the web page structure. The additional libraries employed are:
- Topojson, an extension of GeoJSON that encodes topology, that was needed to read the map’s json and for the representation of all the geographical data at disposal, like streets or employee’s coordinates in space;
- D3, a javascript library designed for an efficient manipulation of the DOM, as it allows to apply data-driven transformations to the document with flexibility;
- Crossfilter, a library for exploring multivariate and high dimensional datasets and performing data filtering or grouping;
- Plotly.js, an open source graphing library with a detailes API reference which offers the possibility to create charts of all kinds.