CLOVIS is a concept, an idea, on visual intelligence systems. The name is for Clever Little Open Visual Intelligence System. The concept for this prototype was to bring together what is known about local labour markets what is done by programs. In essence, bringing together "what we know and what we do" in a visual interactive system. CLOVIS was created to assist decision-makers and policy design to be better at targeting and responding to actual needs based on more pragmatic and precise information.
The other key component of CLOVIS is a new geography: the self-contained labour market areas (SLA) or local labour market areas. For decades, the national economy was seen as a dimensionless thing. We know this isn't true. Regions have their own challenges and the way we measure how well they are doing has been insufficient. The way we defined the boundaries of local economies was too arbitrary.
The local labour market areas are a much better answer. These areas are a grouping of census subdivisions (CSD) based on commuting flows of the employed labour force. In other words it represents the movement of people from their place of residence to their place of work. People who work from home are included because, while they don’t travel to work, they are part of the local workforce. The areas are computed from an algorithm which processes the flows and as such, creates areas based on a direct link between workers and jobs. In essence, a more representative and functional local labour market. This geography is experimental for now and being developed by Statistics Canada.
The areas are using commuting data from the National Household Survey 2011. The flows comprise the place of residence, the place of work and the number of commuters who travel from origin to destination.
For information on the methodology: Munro, Anne, Alessandro Alasia and Ray D. Bollman. Self-contained labour areas: A proposed delineation and classification by degree of rurality.Statistics Canada. Catalogue no. 21-006-X, Vol. 8, No. 8 (December 2011).
Developing visual information systems for ourselves in public service using cost-effective open source technologies is the future of consuming data for policy and decision-making. Leveraging open source technology offers an opportunity to analysts and data scientists in Governments to develop capacity for better open data science, something I strongly believe Governments should be key players in.
CLOVIS is available under the open source [ISC License] (https://opensource.org/licenses/ISC).
CLOVIS is making use of D3 for data visualizations and localization. d3.js is available under a BSD-License.