Geo-visualization of agricultural products price data based on WebGIS

In China, there is a large amount of data about agricultural products price released by thousands of agricultural websites on the Internet. These records are basically displayed in the form of text, table, and statistics chart but location information cannot be displayed graphically. Rich client and WebGIS techniques can improve representation of agricultural products price and help to provide effective technological solutions for increasing data. First, we describe the methods of standardizing agricultural products price data, which is crawled from agricultural websites through vertical search engine. Forward maximum matching algorithm is then explained and applied for spatializing data. After that, technologies of WebGIS based on rich client (JavaScript/Ajax and Flex) are summarized and analyzed and the map visualization methods of agricultural products price are presented, taking Baidu Map API and ArcGIS API for Flex for example. The methods can provide visual, interactive, user-friendly representation of agricultural products price data in geography information system as well as share visualization services through Internet or Intranet to improve data exchange and utilization. Compared to traditional WebGIS, WebGIS based on RIA improves user satisfaction and increases response speed. The results demonstrate that WebGIS by using RIA technology is a feasible solution method for map visualization of agricultural products price.