Oleksandr Matsibora. Web-atlas of demography of Ukraine, developed with Vue.js (Quasar.js), Leaflet.js, vector tiles and a flat architecture implementation

Author
Oleksandr Matsibora
Published

DOI

Public data of the social and economic life in Ukraine has become and object of interest more and more often because of humanitarian aims, charity and other activity. The problem is that spatial datasets of the different providers do not align with the attributes of other public datasets.

That complex question was solved during the development of prototype of the “Web Atlas of Demography of Ukraine” in two stages:

I. Design of the database. By using the power of SQL spatial datasets of the administrative units of Ukraine (settlements, communities, districts, regions) were joined to official dataset of the estimated population of Ukraine on 01.01.2022 (see the data flow diagram):

Web-atlas of demography of Ukraine (diagram)

II. Development of the web-GIS application. For a prototype of the web Atlas which will be updated just a few times a year “serverless” architecture looks as the most promising approach. Because in some cases it has a lot of advantages compared to “traditional” systems (see the web-GIS architecture diagram):

Web-atlas of demography of Ukraine (architecture)

Web Atlas of Demography is a web-based geographic information system, which is developed with only open source technologies and free public data. The main idea behind this application is a “flat architecture”, meaning that all data and configuration logic is stored in JSON (geoJSON) files. This serverless approach allows to build a web-GIS application, which can be deployed to any web host and used to manage almost “unlimited” amounts of spatial or attribute data.

Web Atlas of Demography is a working full-featured prototype of a web atlas for any social or economic, quantitative or qualitative data related to spatial objects. In some meaning this web-GIS application is unique, because it is a combination of the modern administrative units of Ukraine (after 2020) and the latest official population data for each settlement. Population of approximately 30000 settlements of Ukraine was processed. Currently it consists of five examples of maps, where the same dataset is used with different levels of aggregation and approaches to visualization.

Main features of the Web Atlas of Demography:

  • Serverless technology: all programming logic and code has been running on client side, web-hosting is just for storing configuration files

  • Easy deployment: client side web-GIS can be deployed literally into any environment: traditional shared web-hosting, cloud services (Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, MS Azure, etc) or free hosting on GitHub

  • Simple maintenance: maintenance is based on updating data or configuration files without regular updates to the “core” or “modules”

  • Unlimited amounts of attributes: unlimited amounts of attributes for the exact dataset of spatial objects (qualitative or quantitative)

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