Technological infrastructure supporting the story network principle of the Atlas of the Ageing Society

Abstract

Atlases have a long tradition of showing and linking information for the exploration of various mostly spatially related topics. The Atlas of the Ageing Society is an interactive platform illustrating age related data. It enables individuals to explore facts and information related to age and the ageing society. To support content representation as well as a diverse audience, we developed the “story network principle”, which embeds annotated visualizations into a network of information in order to allow storytelling with data. Enabling the exploration of such a multifaceted and highly interconnected data landscape, however, posed some technical challenges. This paper describes and discusses a back-end implementation that meets the requirements of the story network principle from a technical perspective. We detail and exemplify the design and implementation of the atlas infrastructure to enable others to benefit from our developments and approaches to the challenges. The story network principle is potentially applicable to a range of applications such as other atlases or digital portfolios.