Microsoft partner, IDV Solutions, recently released a new interactive application demo that visualizes vehicle collision data. The demo is built using their data visualization product--Visual Fusion--and integrates Microsoft Silverlight and a stack of other Microsoft technologies that make up the Microsoft SingleView platform: Bing Maps, Sharepoint and SQL Server 2008. SingleView brings together these Microsoft technologies to allow organizations to better manage their data and to collaborate around that data in a visual manner (thanks to Bing Maps!). It provides a consolidated, geo-spatial representation of an entire data and information landscape. You can deploy Microsoft SVP easily across multiple roles and user interfaces to support faster and better-informed decision-making with timely and effective coordination among all stakeholders.

Collision Watch visualizes data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Adminstration. It shows automobile collisions occurring in 2007, that resulted in one or more fatalities, and details the conditions that were involved. The data set contains over 36,000 incidents and is visualized in two ways: as discrete points and as a heat map wieghted for the number of fatalities per incident.

The demo features several interactive capabilities:

  • Pan and zoom both the map and its timeline
  • Filter on contributing factors such as alcohol, drowsiness and speeding
  • Filter on time attributes such as month, day and time of day
  • Filter on characteristics such as the number of vehicles involved in a collision, the number of fatalities, and the posted speed limit
  • Bring in additional data sources such as web feeds or search results from Bing, Wikipedia and Flickr

This is a great example of what I have been preaching to customers over the last several years: when data is plotted on a map, the geospatial relationship between those datapoints becomes more clear and trends and patterns become more apparent more quickly. For example, the default speed filter setting in Collision Watch is 75 MPH. When "turning down" this filter, the number of datapoints in the heat map drops significantly. This suggests, not surprisingly, that accidents occurring at higher speeds are more likely to result in fatalities. Also not a big surprise ... when you zoom out from the default zoom factor over the default location--the San Fransco bay area--you will see that the heat map over Los Angeles is much brighter due to a higher concentratoin of data points in that area. In other words, there are more traffic accident related fatalities in the Los Angeles region than in the Bay Area.

Using this application, analysis could be taken a step further to leverage the Bing Maps high resolution aerial imagery for a closer look at locations, such as a turn in a road or a particular intersection, where the map data may show a trend of recurring accidents involving fatalities. Through the Bing Maps imagery, we might discover something about that location that could be contributing to these accidents.

Good stuff from our friends at IDV Solutions. Check it out: http://vfdemo.idvsolutions.com/collisions/

-=Virtual Jerry