Dashboards – new tools of cartographic communication

Abstract

Dashboards are single-screen visualization systems, where various critical pieces of information are placed in the form of panels. They allow the user to take a shared view on a given dataset. Although dashboards can include not just text, charts and graphs, but also webmaps, their potential in terms of highly interactive, explorable visualizations for cartographic concerns in a narrower sense has not been investigated yet. In this article, we discuss the applicability of dashboards for representing large volumes of sensitive point data. Our aim is to demonstrate how cartographic dashboards facilitate spatial insights and visual analysis. We also touch upon the challenges faced by cartographers when creating complex dashboards. Although there are many open-source and commercial platforms available to create dashboards, we will take most examples here from ESRI’s ArcGIS Operation Dashboards web application. However, our findings should be general enough to apply also for other spatial dashboard applications independently of the concrete frontend chosen.