A System for Interactive Spatial Analysis via Potential Maps

International audienceThis paper presents a new cartographic tool for spatial analysis of social data, using the potential smoothing method. The purpose of this method is to view the spreading of a phenomenon (demographic, economical, social, etc.) in a continuous way, at a macroscopic scale, from data sampled on administrative areas. We aim to offer an interactive tool, accessible through the Web, but guarantying the confidentiality of data. The biggest difficulty is induced by the high complexity of the calculus, dealing with a great amount of data. A distributed architecture is proposed: map computation is made on server-side, using particular optimization techniques, whereas map visualization and parameterisation of the analysis are done on a web-based client, the two parts communicating through a Web protocol