LOICZView

Early coastal typology experiments within LOICZ-I demonstrated that expert-judgment approaches alone were not adequate, and that there was a need to improve on principal component analysis (PCA), which produced promising results but required repetitive trials and slow, laborious techniques for displaying and mapping the results. Prof. Maxwell embarked on the development of a tool, LOICZView, that was eventually served to the community as Web-LOICZView: a geospatially oriented tool for clustering and other analyses with data-manipulation capabilities and tabular and map-projected as well as linear graphical outputs. When linked to consistently formulated half-degree database, this tool provided even inexperienced users with the ability to explore relationships through clustering and mapped visualization of the results.

LOICZView can be used either by uploading data in a specified format, or by transferring data from the linked databases at the joint Hexacoral-LOICZ site or the US Estuaries site. It offers supervised, unsupervised, and cross clustering, eigenvector analysis and a variety of data and cluster manipulation options. The website contains Help and Tutorial features. Although DISCO is the new platform for further development, WLV is maintained because it has some capabilities that have not yet been incorporated into the newer software.