LocalCompanies: Visual Analytics of spatial aligned regional companies

Abstract

Municipal authorities have, among other tasks, a great interest in supporting their local economy. For this purpose, they provide consulting offices that advise companies and mediate cooperation partners. The city administration of Leipzig created a business register in which companies can provide their competences in free text fields. This business register contains over 1000 entries and it is not straight forward to find and compare companies based on their self-descriptions. In this paper, we propose a new visualization to analyze the distribution of local companies and exploring the competence profiles of the companies. In order to visualize connections between companies, we perform a semantic analysis. In detail, we use the management staff listing and the core competence descriptions to link the entries. The company location and the connections between the companies are visualized on a map or as a graph. The visualization provides several filtering and interaction mechanisms on demand. From a governance perspective, this leads to insights into company and industry sector networks within a local economic zone.