Web map application for presidential elections 2006 Nordic Forum for Geo-statistics 2006 Kongsvinger 12.-14.09.2006 Liisa Kanerva liisa.kanerva@stat.fi My name is Liisa Kanerva, I am from Statistics Finland department of Information services. My subject is the Web Map application for presidential elections 2006 As you might remember from last year, the technology of our web map services went out of date. That was because ESRA’s previous software MOIMS couldn’t be ported onto XP platform. Due to lack of the time and resources we decided to buy the solution A company named Smilehous won the competition bidding.

Web map application for presidential elections 2006 Application functionality http://kartat.stat.fi/vaalit2006/ Application technology Summary At first I would like to demo you the functionality of the application. After that I will tell you about the technology, quite generally, and the difficulties we found when building the application and finally I will summarise how we felt about the outcome. Liisa Kanerva 22/04/2019

Application technology Browser The user interface is implemented with Javascript Data and maps are updated by passing ArcXML requests and responses to and from the Map server XHTML,CSS, Javascript, XmlHttpRequest Web Server Java 2,JRE HTTP (ArcXML) Application Server J2EE Servlets ArcIMS needs Java 2 components to build and administer Web sites. Map Server ArcIMS/Image server Map Server has responsibility for drawing maps and sending them as Web-appropriate images dbf shape ...And we take a look at the technology of this solution.. the user interface, as you noticed, lies on the browser. It is implemented with XHTML and Javascript. The client communicate utilising HTTP and the messages are written in arcXML. The web server includes besides IIS 6 also Java 2 components . ArcIMS needs Java components to build and administer the web sites. And finally there are the ArcIMS map server who takes care of rendering and drawing the maps etc. We had the election’s results in the tables inside MSSQL -server so we needed a module to create dbf-tables for shapefiles. JDBC CreateDbf MSSQL Liisa Kanerva 22/04/2019

Plug-ins The histogram is implemented using JFreeChar- library 1 2 PDF printouts utilize iText -library JPG- and PNG conversion utilize Java2D-library For some elements in the application we looked for plug-in. First there is the histogram. For it a library called JFreeChart was found . And the next ones works to convert outputs: PDF layouts utilise iText-library and JPG- and PNG conversions Java2D-library, All those libraries can be downloaded from the NET free of charge. 2 1 Liisa Kanerva 22/04/2019

Call offs Vector format inside PDF Stress tests Then we had some problems. There was some features in our scheme we couldn’t get For the printed media we wanted to have vector maps inside PDF. But It was possible that only raster images could wrap inside PDF in the ArcIMS solution like ours. That was a very disappointing thing for us. The other one kept us excited. We knew from experience that to create the PDF-layout is a very heavy process for the machine. So we wanted the stress tests to be done for the application. How ever our supplier couldn’t find any tools for those tests. So we bought some extra storage and hoped for the best. . Liisa Kanerva 22/04/2019

Hitches Default classification method and colour for every theme A site without frames Direct links to the service http://kartat.stat.fi/vaalit2006/index.html#namesonoff=true&boundarysonoff=true&minx=2805491&miny=6639820&maxx=4012418&maxy=7784320&lang=FI&region=vaalipiiri&themeroot=1&themeselect=EH04KAN1 The supplier had no experience of statistical thematic maps. They found it very tricky to understand why statisticians wanted to do so sophisticated work such as our default colours and classifications. They were quite sure that it would be impossible to get reasonable source code from such a complicated thing. After all the problem was solved with decision tables . In Statistics Finland our www pages are all without frames. That’s because we want it possible to give a direct link to a particular page. Frames are very useful in applications where you have updates here and there on the page. But no frames was no questions. With the direct links the supplier made good by putting users selections in the anchor of the address line on the browser. The solution for the frame less page, meanwhile, was to update the page by remoulding the structure of the Document Object Module of the page. Liisa Kanerva 22/04/2019

Summary Finally, in five months, we had a solution which, definitely, is very fast and very informative but may be not so easy to use, quite worthy anyway although we had more higher ambitions and plans. That was pretty much all I had. Liisa Kanerva 22/04/2019