Ageing Population in Europe and Japan 1960-2009 with indicators from the World Bank statistical database

An embedded interactive Vislet in a public web page
In this public web site, NComVA presents an innovative technology that focuses on the most ancient of social rituals: “storytelling” – exemplified through telling a geovisual analytics story about a country’s development over time and shape the measure of demographics, economic, health and well-being. Discoveries that more engagingly draw us into reflections about the knowledge on how life is lived - and can be improved – from region to region and in addition let the reader dynamically participate in this interactive process and help advancing technology critical to the dissemination of official statistics by means of web-enabled reporting tools. Geovisual analytics is a technique that can help illustrating high-dimensional statistical temporal data which for the eye are hard perceive or interpret. We demonstrate visual “storytelling” means for the author to import large spatio-temporal statistical data (here from the World Bank database), explore and discern trends, create a story with snapshots and metadata and finally publish understandings and knowledge embedded in this public web page. The story and its snapshots guide the reader in the directions of both context and discovery through a highly engaging intuitive visual interface “vislet” based on cognitive principles and at the same time follow the analyst’s way of logical reasoning. Value no longer relies solely on the content but also on the ability to access this information.

This dynamic web site was produced by our Statistics Publisher application using a story developed in the World eXplorer based on selected statistics data from the 420 indicators among the World Development Indicators (WDI) covering 209 countries from 1960 to 2009.



Figure: Three interactive and dynamic linked views map, scatter plot and histogram showing population age group 65+ in the map and histogram, while the scatter plot also includes the age group 0-14 on the horizontal axis allowing you to the correlation between these to age groups for the years 1960-2008. You can click on any country in the world map which is then highlighted in each view. You can select more than country simultaneously and compare countries by pressing CTR button at the same time. You can select 3 indicators in all views age 0-14, 15-64 and 65+. The (?) icons give you more information how to navigate these three graphs.

This innovative interactive web visualization demonstrator tells a story about ”ageing population (age 65+) in Europe and Japan" during the period 1960-2008. We compare the countries Sweden, Germany, Italy, Japan and China. We see that Japan in 1960 starts with the lowest percentage values for age 65+ and then have a fast negative development to much higher rates of elderly people and at the same time a lower percentages of younger people (age 0-14). In 1988, Sweden is the leading country for age 65+ (click on button 2), while in 2008 Japan, Italy and Germany represents the countries with highest elderly population. In these 50 years, Nigeria has not changed much (button 4).