Open Data Visual Analytics to Support Decisions on Physical Investments

Abstract Before making decisions about the location of physical investments (e.g. factories, warehouses, stores, etc.), investors have to conduct thorough profiling on the prospective locations of the physical facilities. For this profiling purpose, investors consider a number of important aspects such as the location’s local resources, market size, economic growth, regional minimum wage (salary) standard, land acquisition cost, human development index, and gross domestic product (GDP). While conducting manual research on those decision variables can cost extensive time and efforts, in this article, we present an open data visual analytics which will help investors in making decisions on the prospective location of physical investments. Investors can use the web-based application to easily gather information and do a quick comparison among prospective investment locations in terms of the selected decision variables.