4Eyes

About

The 4Eyes project involved designing and implementing a functional demo of a web-based information visualization application for logistics data. The project was commissioned by Logia Software, a subsidiary of Itella. A production version of the application would be used by managers and executives who need business intelligence for supporting decision-making and recognizing business opportunities.

Design and implementation

After gathering requirements, exploring concepts and evaluating available tools, we settled on three visualizations: an arc visualization, a parallel coordinate plot and a map. The arc visualization will give an overview of the flow of goods, while parallel coordinate plot will show details on what kinds of packages are being sent (e.g. large or small, light or heavy). Finally, displaying the traffic and warehouses on a map will be especially helpful in making decisions related to storage. The user will be presented with pregenerated reports customized to their needs.

The demo was implemented on a LAMP stack, using PHP and MySQL for the back end and HTML, CSS and Javascript for the front end. We utilized Protovis (an open source visualization library) and Google Maps API for the visualizations. A large part of the programming effort went into manipulating the data and making the visualizations work on Internet Explorer.

Results

The project was challenging and the schedule tight, but in the end, it all worked out and we were able to meet all of the requirements. Our supervisors at Logia Software were very pleased with the results. In the course of the project we learned a lot about doing information visualization in the real world. It is not as straightforward as it may seem, but the obstacles can be overcome.