One Arabesque in the small world of OD webmaps

Abstract

Arabesque is an application for the exploration and geovisualisation of origin-destination flows (or spatial networks), developed within the framework of the Univ. Gustave Eiffel (ex. IFSTTAR)-funded research project geographic flow visualisation (gflowiz) geoflowiz, in collaboration with the CNRS. It allows both the exploration and the filtering of OD data and their representation, with a strong emphasis on geographic information layering and features' semiology. The key-objective is to propose an easy way to produce a modern cartography (a geovisualisation) of thematic flows (e.g. bilateral flow volume), at several geographic scales, even from your own datasets. The objective of this article is to position Arabesque in the range of geoweb applications for producing flow maps, by comparing its functionalities with those of similar web applications - Magrit, Kepler.gl, flowmap.blue - pointing out their respective advantages and limitations. The analysis of its functionalities is compared on the same flow dataset - MOBSCO, i.e. a dataset describing the school mobility of French pupils and students on a given year - for a practical and empirical "validation" of its contributions. We demonstrate that the configurations and appearances of these tools' visual output depend largely on the culture of their developers, and on the use and audiences for which they have been developed.