Introduction to the special section on Visual Movement Analytics

PostprintNon peer reviewe

FlowMapper.org: A web-based framework for designing origin-destination flow maps

FlowMapper.org is a web-based framework for automated production and design of origin-destination flow maps (https://flowmapper.org). FlowMapper has four major features that contribute to the advancement of existing flow mapping systems. First, users can upload and process their own data to design and share customized flow maps. The ability to save data, cartographic design and map elements in a project file allows users to easily share their data and cartographic design with others. Second, users can customize the flow line symbology by including options to change the flow line style, width, and coloring. FlowMapper includes algorithms for drawing curved line styles with varying thickness along a flow line, which reduces the visual cluttering and overlapping by tapering flow lines at origin and destination points. The ability to customize flow symbology supports different flow map reading tasks such as comparing flow magnitudes and directions and identifying flow and location clusters that are strongly connected with each other. Third, FlowMapper supports supplementary layers such as node symbol, choropleth, and base maps to contextualize flow patterns with location references and characteristics such as net-flow, gross flow, net-flow ratio, or a locational attribute such as population density. FlowMapper also supports user interactions to zoom, filter, and obtain details-on-demand functions to support visual information seeking about nodes, flows and regions. Finally, the web-based architecture of FlowMapper supports server side computational capabilities to process, normalize and summarize large flow data to reveal natural patterns of flows

Economic institutions and the location strategies of European multinationals in their geographic neighborhood

This article investigates how the location behavior of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) is shaped by the economic institutions of the host countries. The analysis covers a wide set of geographically proximate economies with different degrees of integration with the ‘Old’ 15 European Union (EU) members: New Member States, Accession and Candidate Countries, as well as European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) countries and the Russian Federation. The article aims to shed new light on the heterogeneity of MNE preferences for the host countries’ regulatory settings (including labor market and business regulation), legal aspects (i.e. protection of property rights and contract enforcement) and the weight of the government in the economy. By employing data on 6,888 greenfield investment projects, the random-coefficient Mixed Logit analysis shows that, while the quality of the national institutional framework is generally beneficial for the attraction of foreign investment, MNEs preferences over economic institutions are highly heterogeneous across sectors and business functions

Identifying tourist-functional relations of urban places through Foursquare from Barcelona

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in GEOJOURNAL. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10708-019-10055-9Previous research has mainly focused on spatial relations among tourist attractions in urban areas. However, few studies have examined the functional relations between tourist attractions and other urban places (i.e. the flows of tourists between them). Therefore, this study focuses on quantification of the tourist-functional relations among Places of Interest (POIs) using Foursquare data from Barcelona. This represents an effort to highlight the important functional closeness between different types of POIs whose significance is not usually obvious from their spatial relationships. In order to quantify these functional relationships, this paper classifies Foursquare POIs into 22 categories according to their different usages and constructs a matrix of usage-flows to depict the connections among these different usages. A model of interaction values is introduced to describe the strength of relations and identify the dominant tourist usages. The results confirm that the functional centroids differ from these spatial distributions which only focused around tourist attractions. In addition to tourist attractions, places in the categories of Restaurants, Transport, and Hotels play important roles in functional relationship of tourism. The typical urban usages of tourists can be distinguished by the interaction values between these categories. Our model provides a practical method to quantify the interlinkage of usages of POIs based on tourist flows. In particular, LBSN data has potential as a method to observe the tourist-functional relations among places.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft