Technological infrastructure supporting the story network principle of the Atlas of the Ageing Society

Peer-reviewed

Journal Article

Author

Zanda, A., Lutz, J., Heymann, A., and Bleisch, S.

Published

2019

Doi

10.37040/geografie2019124020217

[pdf]

Abstract

Atlases have a long tradition of showing and linking information for the exploration of various mostly spatially related topics. Be Atlas of the Ageing Society is an interactive platform illustrating age related data. It enables individuals to explore facts and information related to age and the ageing society. To support content representation as well as a diverse audience, we developed the “story network principle”, which embeds annotated visualizations into a network of information in order to allow storytelling with data. Enabling the exploration of such a multifaceted and highly interconnected data landscape, however, posed some technical challenges. Bis paper describes and discusses a back-end implementation that meets the requirements of the story network principle from a technical perspective. We detail and exemplify the design and implementation of the atlas infrastructure to enable others to beneﬁt from our developments and approaches to the challenges. Be story network principle is potentially applicable to a range of applications such as other atlases or digital portfolios.

Figures

An example card of the Atlas of the Ageing Society showing a title, a visualization and a short description on the le-hand side. On the top right-hand side one example implementation of a navigation based on the story network principle with a storyline in green and related connections in other colors is shown.

Schematic illustration of the story network principle – building a network by defining thematic connections between annotated visualizations. Adapted from Bleisch, Zanda, Korkut (2018).

je data model consists of relations between a substantial number of nodes to construct a network. Different types of relations exist in order to establish the network (“related”) and to allow the definition of storylines (“hasPrevious” and “hasNext”).

Combinations of relation types for nodes with two relations

je extended network data model illustrating further relations from nodes to meta-nodes

Technical infrastructure based on the MVC architecture. Le: the data in OrientDB, middle: the functionality in Node.js, upper right: the card views implemented as a website, and lower right (with white background): the optional “Excel importer” to support content definition in Excel sheets (data.xlsx) and importing it (xlsimporter.js) into the database.

BibTeX

@article{zanda_technologicalInfraStoryNetworkAA_2019,
 abstract = {Atlases have a long tradition of showing and linking information for the exploration of various mostly spatially related topics. Be Atlas of the Ageing Society is an interactive platform illustrating age related data. It enables individuals to explore facts and information related to age and the ageing society. To support content representation as well as a diverse audience, we developed the “story network principle”, which embeds annotated visualizations into a network of information in order to allow storytelling with data. Enabling the exploration of such a multifaceted and highly interconnected data landscape, however, posed some technical challenges. Bis paper describes and discusses a back-end implementation that meets the requirements of the story network principle from a technical perspective. We detail and exemplify the design and implementation of the atlas infrastructure to enable others to beneﬁt from our developments and approaches to the challenges. Be story network principle is potentially applicable to a range of applications such as other atlases or digital portfolios.},
 author = {Zanda, Adriana and Lutz, Jonas and Heymann, Alesya and Bleisch, Susanne},
 doi = {10.37040/geografie2019124020217},
 journal = {Geografie},
 number = {2},
 pages = {217--235},
 title = {Technological infrastructure supporting the story network principle of the {Atlas} of the {Ageing} {Society}},
 url = {https://geografie.cz/124/2/0217/},
 volume = {124},
 year = {2019}
}