SeismographAPI: Visualising Temporal-Spatial Crisis Data
This addresses the need for accessible crisis data visualization tools, particularly for low-resource environments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing open-source library concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of time-consuming and technically demanding development of interactive dashboards for crisis data visualization by introducing SeismographAPI, an open-source library that enables efficient visualization of temporal-spatial crisis data at country and sub-country levels, as demonstrated in conflict and pandemic monitoring use cases.
Effective decision-making for crisis mitigation increasingly relies on visualisation of large amounts of data. While interactive dashboards are more informative than static visualisations, their development is far more time-demanding and requires a range of technical and financial capabilities. There are few open-source libraries available, which is blocking contributions from low-resource environments and impeding rapid crisis responses. To address these limitations, we present SeismographAPI, an open-source library for visualising temporal-spatial crisis data on the country- and sub-country level in two use cases: Conflict Monitoring Map and Pandemic Monitoring Map. The library provides easy-to-use data connectors, broad functionality, clear documentation and run time-efficiency.