A web-based visual analytics system for air quality monitoring data

With the increasingly severe air pollution, how to effectively process and analyze air quality data has become a hot issue. This paper introduces visual analytics into the processing and analysis of air quality data, and presents a web-based visual analytics system, AirVIS, for collaborative and comprehensive analysis on the spatial-temporal and multi-dimensional features of air quality monitoring datasets. This system offers three visual views: a GIS view used for spatial analysis, a scatter plot view used for temporal analysis and a parallel coordinate's view used for multi-dimensional analysis, all of which are inner-tied by the newest air environment standard, unified color-mapping strategies of Air Quality Index (AQI) levels and various interactive means. In case studies, our paper takes the air quality data in Beijing as our examples and illustrates that how this system provides users with deepened insight to discern the spatial-temporal characteristics and analyze the internal links of different air pollutants.