DaViTo: An Open-Source Mapping, Graphics, and Analysis Tool

• Activity Number: 612
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 2, 2012 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Computing
• Author(s): Samuel Buttrey*+ and James Henry and Lyn R Whitaker and Arnold Buss
• Companies: Naval Postgraduate School and U.S. Army TRAC-Monterey and Naval Postgraduate School and Naval Postgraduate School
• Keywords: GIS ; Visualization ; Point process

Abstract

Analysts in contemporary military operational environments accumulate vast amounts of data. These include data on, for example, incidents like IEDs; vehicle tracking; surveys; local economics; and demographics. Much of this will include a spatio-temporal component. Visualizing, exploring, and understanding this data reveals insights about our own forces' behavior as well as patterns within the environment. The Data Visualization Tool (DaViTo) merges several open-source software packages to create a single data exploration tool capable of uncovering these insights and patterns. The tool provides a suite of data exploration methods (current focused on point processes) that can be applied to the data by military analysts, who will be experts in operations rather than statistics. DaViTo's power derives from the capabilities of the open-source software upon which it has been built: OpenMap, JFreeChart, and R. Statisticians can provide additional functionality through R and its packages without Java programming. DaViTo is government-owned software, built solely with open-source tools, which may be run from a CD even in secure computing environments.