Mission Statement:

Display & Analysis of 

Spatial Interaction with

focus on Spatial Aspects

of Public & Private

Service Delivery

Website sponsors / Webwerf borge:

EGIS foundation & Geogap BV

 

General Information
Samples of Research Questions & Flowmap Solutions
Frequently Asked Questions by Flowmap Users
Tips & Tricks for Experienced Flowmap Users
Procedural Questions, Warnings & Error Messages
Flowmap Apps, Manuals & Training Materials

What Flowmap can do for you
Examples from a Spatial Analysis Study of Season Ticket Holders in Dutch Soccer

 

Accessibility / Suitability Mapping:

A Suitability Map based on the Threshold Distance Accessibility Measure gives insight in market size and growth potential for potential and existing club locations.

Brownfields Service Location Modelling:

The 37 existing professional soccer clubs are mostly oriented very locally. Service Location Modelling can be used to identify those clubs that could have a more regional function and attract at least 10,000 season ticket holders from within an half hour drive time by car

Greenfields Service Location Modelling:

Ignoring existing club sites greenfields service location modelling can be used to identify sites at a European scale and potentially attract 100,000  season ticket holders within an hour drive time by car

Catchment Area Analysis a.k.a Closest Facility Analysis:

Demarcate the catchment area of each soccer clubs based on the principle of spatial rationality or what would the market area of a club look like when all soccer fans simply went to the closest club

Desire Line Mapping:

 “Desire Lines” depict the spatial interaction (flows) as straight lines between in this case home municipality and club stadium of season ticketholders. Only ‘flows’ of 100 or more ticketholders showing.

Transport Network Analysis:

 Calculate the car travel time for all Dutch roads to the nearest soccer club. The result can be to illustrate the spatial equity aspect of the distribution of clubs over the country.

Trade Area Analysis:

Primary Trade Areas demarcate the core (60%) business area of each soccer club. Most clubs turn out have a unique local market position. Only the trade areas of the three ‘big’ clubs (Ajax Amsterdam, Feyenoord Rotterdam & PSV Eindhoven) overlap with other clubs.

Traffic Load Analysis:

Calculate the additional traffic pressure on the road system when clubs play at home under the assumption that fans travelling by car will go for the (under normal conditions) quickest path from home to club. The traffic load is shown using proportional thickness on affected roads only.

Spatial Clustering:

The ‘Intramax’ clustering method based on strength of spatial interaction reveals potential fusion partners or regional subdivisions .

Soccer data courtesy Sjef van Hoof & Trudo de Jonghe
 

Flowmap Mission Statement

Flowmap is a software package dedicated to the display, analysis and prediction of (mostlly human) spatial interaction also known as flow data. Flow data concern  a special form of spatial data in the sense that there are two different geographic locations connected to each data item: an origin location where the flow starts and a destination location where the flow ends. The flow data itself can consist of an amount of people (e.g. commuters, shoppers, hospital visitors), animals (migrating birds), goods, usage of agricultural services or telecommunication and so on.

Human flow data is usually bound to some form of transport network (roads, rails, pipelines, rivers, aircorridors).  Flow data differs from other spatial in the sense that is is not only hard to capture from above but also often implies a summation of movements (by one or more individuals)  between two locations during a time period that can vary from hours to years.

Although flow data is typical spatial data, most thematic mapping and GIS packages have little functionality for treating this kind of information. Since 1990 Flowmap fills this gap. Flowmap is a desktop application originally developed at the Faculty of Geosciences of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Nowadays Flowmap is maintained by TdJ Consultancy CC, Stellenbosch, South Africa.

 

Flowmap Version X1 available as off Februari 2024

The first Flowmap revision in 10 years! Major change is the platform upgrade from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Studio 2022: Visual Basic .Net to ensure future functionality. Moreover, the database system has been upgraded to dBASE IV to allow the handling of larger datasets.

The main menu has been reorganized into more functional units. A guiding overview to find the old functionality in the new menu structure can be found in “Flowmap 742-X1 Menu Links

The Flowmap window will appear maximized to your screen but if desired can be flexibly scaled to other dimensions. The smallest size is 1024×768 pixels. Please note that any resize action will automatically invoke a ‘Clear Screen’ operation, A ‘workaround’ for this ‘Clear Screen’ can be found in the ‘Tips & Tricks‘ Section

The legend is no longer scrollable, but may now appear in two columns to allow for 32 slots

Flowmap projects have been extended with a separate slot for the ‘Transport Network File’ to avoid the frequent need to change the ‘Map File’ from polygons matching Origin/Destination locations to a relevant transport network and vice versa.

A limited amount of new functionality has been added, an overview of all major new functionality like “Trade Area Analysis” and import of “CSV, GeoJSON, GPL and GPX” files can be found in “New in Flowmap X1”. Also options have been added to change the background color and to use transparent colors for drawing and shading.

The standard ‘Educational’ version has been replaced by the ‘Regular’ version that now contains all Flowmap functionality. Go to the ‘Download’ section of this site to obtain your free regular version of the new FlowmapX1.

The ‘Professional’ license has changed to the ‘Commercial’ license, that also facilitates the processing of Flowmap functionality in the background of your own application. See the paragraph on this site regarding the Commercial License for more information.

Discontinued are the “Activation Assistant”, the “Background Bitmap” and the import/export of ‘MOSS’ formatted files.