Pacific Northwest National Laboratory - CORE

VAST 2008 Challenge

Mini Challenge 2: Migrant Boats (geo-temporal analysis)

Bob Baddeley, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, bob.baddeley@pnl.gov

Student team: NO

Tool:

CORE is a web application framework written at PNNL primarily by me using open source software like MySQL and PHP that allows users to easily interface with underlying data and define different types of views easily. Pulling data into CORE tables is easily done, and defining the views of the data is done with a simple interface that allows for complex joins and styles. Views can be maps, timelines, and tables, and can be editable, allowing the user to change the data if necessary. The views can interact with each other, giving the user the ability to see a map and table and timeline side by side, and all viewing the same data in different ways.

Two Page Summary: NO

Answers:

Boat-1 Characterize the choice of landing sites and their evolution over the three years.

Please see the included video for a demonstration of how these graphs were generated using core. In the first year, the landings all took place along the southern tip of Florida and the keys. During the second year, the southern tip was still frequented, but the Western side of Florida was targetted more. During the third year, the Eastern side of Florida was targetted.

Year 1:

Year 2:

Year 3:

To answer this question I parsed the XML and inserted it into a database table in CORE. Then I created a view to show the specific fields of the encounters. Note that encounterdate is renamed as date. CORE recognizes the date field and renders a slider bar on the bottom of the map to let the user filter out specific time ranges. CORE also knows to use the latitude and longitude fields to place the markers.

With CORE I can also join views, so I can have a map and table of the same data side by side. The two operate together because CORE pairs the unique ids for the records and fires events to views to get them to interact with each other. Here is a pair of views showing all of the records:

Boat-2 Characterize the geographical patterns of interdiction over the three years

Year 1:

Year 2:

Year 3:

Interdictions during the first year took place mostly in a small area just at the southern tip of Florida. In the second year it spread a little in each direction. By the third year it had spread considerably, but was still largely in the south. It's evident that interdictions are happening in the open waters in the South, despite the fact that by the third year, more landings are taking place in the North of Florida.

I also graphed by the number of deaths and the vessel type (shown below), but was unable to discern any noticable evolution of either over the three years. In CORE, by defining styles I can change the markers and set the conditions for which markers are shown.

I also graphed record type against the number of deaths to see if interdiction was happening more often on ships where death had occurred or if landed ships had more deaths. This was also inconclusive.

Boat- 3 What is the successful landing rate over the time period?

441 Landings, 476 Interdictions. However, this is not even over time. There were only 152 records in the first year, 299 in the second year, and 466 in the third year, so clearly the number of attempts has been growing very fast.