Spatio-temporal analysis of industrial composition with IVIID: an interactive visual analytics interface for industrial diversity

The industrial composition of places has received considerable attention because of the widespread belief that industrial diversity buffers regional economies from economic shocks. Subsequently, a variety of toolkits and indices have been developed with the goal of better capturing the compositional dynamics of regions. Although useful, a key drawback of these indices is their static nature, which limits the utility of these indices in a space–time context. This paper provides an overview of and applications of an interface called interactive visualization tool for indices of industrial diversity, which is a visual analytics tool developed specifically for the analysis and visualization of local measures of industrial composition for areal data. This overview will include a discussion of its key features, as well as a demonstration of the utility of the interface in exploring questions surrounding diversity and the dynamic nature of composition through space and time. A focus of this demonstration is to highlight how the interactivity and query functionality of this interface overcome several of the obstacles to understanding composition through space and time that prior toolkits and comparative static approaches have been unable to address. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014