The Turing Geovisualisation Engine (TGVE) is a web-based, interactive visual analytics tool for geospatial data analysis, built using R and JavaScript/React, that can be used as a complete server-client application or just as a front-end stand-alone application. The visual views and interaction mechanisms designed into the tool is underpinned by empirically-informed guidelines around visualization design and techniques from Geographic Information Science (GIScience). Additionally, techniques from geographic information science (GIScience) and related domains are used to implement automatic aggregation of temporal and spatial data.

npm package

note: the older versions released under https://www.npmjs.com/package/eatlas is deprecated.

This is a React Component ES Module that can be embedded in your React applications. To install in your project:

npm install @tgve/tgvejs
# or
yarn add @tgve/tgvejs

Then, for an example to import the TGVE package and use it as the main component in a React app, see the tgve/app repo. Following is a snippet of ReactJS from that repo:

import React from 'react';
import Tgve from '@tgve/tgvejs';

function App() {
  return (
    <Tgve defaultURL={process.env.REACT_APP_DEFAULT_URL}/>
  );
}

Configuration settings

TGVE supports separately-provided geography (in GeoJSON or Shapefile) and point data sources (in CSV). Other formats are not supported.

The following parameters can be passed to the TGVE app. Each parameter can be passed as an environment variable, with the exception of:

• leftSidebarContent
• data

For example: REACT_APP_GEOGRAPHY_URL or when using TGVE as a component <Tgve geographyURL="https://geo.com">. For more on passing variables to a React app and the REACT_APP_ prefix please see React docs.

They can also be passed to the TGVE as URL query parameters. For instance localhost:3000?dark=false.

• data: valid geojson object. This can be a component prop value, a URL query parameter or <script id="tgve-data" type="application/json">{geojson:object}</script> as per standard script tag use. If a valid GeoJSON object is provided both defaultURL and geographyURL will be ignored, which also means geographyColumn would be ignored, too.

• defaultURL: which returns a valid geojson object when fetched. It can be used to fetch CSVs which is converted to geojson by TGVE after fetching.

• geographyURL: which returns a valid geojson dataset. If this variable is provided, data is fetched separately along with defaultURL, TGVE uses the geographyColumn to join them. TGVE does this on initialization and when reset button is pressed.

• geographyColumn: a column name which is shared between data within the defaultURL and geographyURL or a mapping between the two. If a mapping is provided it must be in this format: defaultURLColumnName:geographyURLColumnName. This is the joining column that will result in dynamically generating geojson data for TGVE to consume. If a valid column name is not provided TGVE will attempt using the first matching column between the two files. If there is none, TGVE will load the geography data without the data.

• column: if provided, and if the geometry is of particular type which would need a column, it would be used. Defaults on to the second column as often first column is assumed to be an ID of sort.

• select: if provided, either as a string or a JSON object, it will be passed to the tgvejs subsetting workflow. For now, only when the application is started. The format could be one of select={"key1": ["val1", "val2"]} or select=key1:val1,val2:key2:val3,val4. For example: https://tgve.github.io/app/?select=ranking:45 in a dataset with a column named ranking and its value being 45.

• layerName: if provided, and if the given name is in the list of DeckGL layers supported by TGVE, will be passed to generate the layer with the name given.

• dark: by default baseui/baseweb is set to dark, you can change the theme to other (e.g. light)

• leftSidebarContent: is based on React standard children. This is where users can add their own UI and more, though this requires competent React concepts. A simple use would be to pass plain text description of data/project etc.

• viewport: TGVE’s main functionality is to auto-adjust the viewport (see DeckGL docs). However, the initial viewport can be set using this JSON parameter. The default values are: {longitude: -1.6362, latitude: 53.8321, zoom: 10, pitch: 55, bearing: 0}. Feel free to provide as little as you like, if any of these are missing, TGVE will draw them from these default values.

• hideChartGenerator boolean value which would hide the sidebar component which generates charts from the data.

• hideCharts boolean value which would hide all charts. This takes priority over hideChartGenerator parameter.

• hideSidebar boolean value which would hide the left sidebar.

None of the above values is necessary and in the current release “Add data” button allows loading data into eAtlas.

Callbacks

The TGVE supports these callbacks since v1.5.1:

• onViewStateChange: a function to get the viewport of the TGVE which is passed from DeckGL. The returned object is described in DeckGL's documentations here. It contains zoom level, location information (longitude, latitude etc), current camera view (bearing and pitch) and transition details like "transitionDuration".

• onStateChange: a function to get a JSON object which contains the select (filter) state of the TGVE. As the state of the app changes the provided function is called. The returned object contains an object called select which contains columns selected (filtered) with values in an array like {select:{columnName: [value1, value2]}}

In light of the above callbacks, when data is loaded in TGVE via "Add data" button from the local machine (i.e via FileReader API), the TGVE will disable other data sources until "reset" button is pressed.

Shapefiles

For more about shapefiles please refer to this Wikipedia entry. The TGVE can read shapefiles if provided as a zip file using shapefile.js. The package is used as external dependency, therefore, if you do use it make sure you have <script src="https://unpkg.com/shpjs@latest/dist/shp.js"></script> in your React app's index.html file. Then, just add the source as defaultURL=www.domain/shape.zip.

Data and settings

As stated above, you can create a script tag to pass data and above configurations as JSON to where TGVE is being rendered; for example in an index.html where the component is rendered like:

<!--notice the ID names-->
<script id="tgve-data" type="application/json">{'valid':'geojson'}</script>
<script id="tgve-settings" type="application/json">{'defaultURL':'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/layik/eatlas-data/main/casualties_100.geojson','dark':'false'}</script>

External dependenices

The package relies on Plotly to be available as window.Plotly. You can satisify this dependency by adding Plotly in your HTML build where the package is used. For instance version 2.6.3 minifed:

<script src="https://cdn.plot.ly/plotly-2.6.3.min.js"></script>

If you are not sure, please see the app repository.

Testing

The package follows create-react-app testing kits and uses mainly @testing-library/react and jest. Run npm run test.

Contributing

See:

• Contributor Code of Conduct
• developer setup instructions

Package Status

This package is part of ongoing research at the University of Leeds, is provided “as is” and is likely to be changed without warning to meet the research needs of the University.

Citing TGVE

You can cit TGVE like:

@inproceedings {10.2312:evs.20231045,
booktitle = {EuroVis 2023 - Short Papers},
editor = {Hoellt, Thomas and Aigner, Wolfgang and Wang, Bei},
title = {{TGVE: a Tool for Analysis and Visualization of Geospatial Data}},
author = {Hama, Layik and Beecham, Roger and Lomax, Nik},
year = {2023},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-219-6},
DOI = {10.2312/evs.20231045}
}

Funding

The project is led by Dr Nik Lomax and Dr Roger Beecham and funded by the EPSRC via The Alan Turing Institute's AI for Science and Government Programme, grant number EP/T001569/1.