Web-LoiczView [WLV] is a web-based graphical user interface to a set of data analysis tools. These tools are intended to facilitate analysis and understanding of trends and groupings that exist in a spatially indexed data set. WLV was developed with the support of the Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone [LOICZ] program, which is core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program [IGBP]. WLV has been developed mainly for working on geographic data sets with multiple variables defined at each geographic location. It is tightly integrated with the Hexacoral database at the University of Kansas, which contains a wide variety of geographically indexed data sets. WLV is reasonably flexible, however, and can be used with a wide variety of data sets. For example, we have successfully used it to cluster data from a visual gesture tracking application.
The primary data analysis tool is a set of clustering routines that group together similar data points into classes. WLV then gives the user a variety of ways to visualize the classes and the data. To provide for ease of experimentation, there are a variety of data management tools that allow users to manaipulate and control how the data is treated in each analysis step. For example, you can select subsets of variables and weight them according to their importance.
WLV also includes a tool for executing an eigenvector, or principal components analysis on the data set. This tool permits users to understand the principal causes of variation in their data set. It also permits effective visualization of high dimensional data sets.
Finally, WLV includes a tool for analyzing the overall complexity of a data set based on the Minimum Description Length principle. This should be used as an aid in discovering the appropriate number of classes for a given set of variables and data points.
Access to Web-LoiczView is offered as a courtesy to the scientific community. We have done our best to ensure the correctness of the underlying tools, but we can make no guarantees about the correctness or utility of the results. What you get out of WLV is largely dependent upon what you put into it. Furthermore, WLV is still under development as we continue to add features and tools. The help files connected to this page are intended to help users understand how to effectively use WLV for thier own tasks.
If you either A) have a suggestion about how to improve WLV, or B) believe you've found an error in one of the tools, please email maxwell@swarthmore.edu. New users may use one of the numbered user accounts (user##) or ask for a username and password by emailing the address above.