Software & mapping
Geographical software
The Geographical variations product suite uses geographical information software (GIS) developed by the Environmental System Research Institute (Esri). Products were constructed and published from ArcGIS Online, a cloud-based Esri environment. This platform provides a variety of web applications allowing users to explore, analyse, monitor and visualise geographical data. ArcGIS Online software updates occur periodically through the year.
This product utilised ArcOnline to develop a number of maps and dashboards, accessible from the AIHW website under the disease topic page.
For more information on ArcGIS Online.
Dashboard
Disease dashboards were constructed in Operations Dashboard (by Esri), a configurable web app that provides real-time operational views of people, services, assets and events data. Dashboards may contain multiple interactive elements such as maps, charts, imagery and dynamic text within a single interactive page. Dashboards offer a comprehensive and engaging view of the data to provide key insights for at-a-glance decision making.
For more information on Esri Operations Dashboard.
Disease impact maps
Maps form a component of the ArcGIS Online dashboard to represent the geographical variation of disease impact measures. These measures include prevalence, death and hospitalisation mapped to 3 geographic levels— state/territory; Primary Health Network (PHN); and Population Health Area (PHA) and include:
- crude rate
- age-standardised rate
- rate ratio.
Choropleth maps represent the geographical variation of the disease impact. A sequential colour scheme represents high values (high impact) by darker colours and low values (low impact) by lighter colours. A diverging colour scheme was also used where 2 colour schemes represent the variation of values above or below a threshold (for example, rate ratio maps with a threshold value of 1).
The number of categories used for the variation depended on the data distribution; that is, the range between the minimum and maximum value of the measure. The categories represent area-based quantile ranges of between 3 and 10 groups depending on:
- the number of areas to be classified
- the value ranges of the quantiles
- the spread of the measures (as difference between maximum and minimum).
In most cases, state and territory map legends have 3 categories (tertiles) and PHN and PHA map legends have 5 categories (quintiles). The number of quantiles presented in the legend for the rate ratio map varies in some cases, to allow a better classification between areas with rates above the national average. For example, a quantile category with a range between 1 and 1.20 had to be broken down into smaller groups to allow a better classification of areas with similar rate ratios. This results in rate ratio map legends ranging from 5 to 10 categories. Conversely, for measures with a small spread of values, the number of categories used in the legend has been reduced (e.g., HSVD prevalence) as there was not great variation in the measure by geography.