RICHARDSON, TX (November 14, 2011) – The Hive Group, the world’s leading provider of treemap interfaces, today announced that the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) has deployed an innovative application–using technology from The Hive Group–that allows visual analysis of United States agricultural policy.  The CLF is based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the largest school of public health in the world.

The CLF built the application to allow the general public, advocacy groups, and policymakers to visually analyze budget details of the United States Farm Bill with clarity and transparency.  The Farm Bill Budget Visualizer, available at www.jhu.edu/farmbillvisualizer, represents a powerful new mechanism by which specific expenditure categories may be analyzed, compared, researched, and monitored over time.

The Farm Bill Budget Visualizer can increase awareness about how Farm Bill funds are allocated, both across administrative categories, and based on newly coded categories such as “public health,” “fruit and vegetable access,” or “commodity grain production.”  Additionally, by drawing together otherwise-unavailable budgetary data, the Farm Bill Budget Visualizer can enable analyses that were previously impossible.  Finally, its interactive nature may help engage interest in the Farm Bill.  According to Roni Neff, PhD, CLF’s Research and Policy Director, “Transparency is a key theme and objective of our work.  We’ve not only provided our audiences with access to details of the Farm Bill budget, but also provided a new way to understand this complex piece of legislation.”

Jim Bartoo, CEO of The Hive Group, calls the Farm Bill Budget Visualizer an “important step toward the increasing expectation of transparency around public spending.”  Consistent with this theme, The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future plans to deploy additional treemap applications to the public.

About The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future

The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future promotes research and develops and communicates information about the complex interrelationships among diet, food production, environment and human health; advances an ecological perspective in reducing threats to the health of the public; and promotes policies that protect health, the global environment and the ability to sustain life for future generations.  The Center is based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the education of a diverse group of research scientists and public health professionals, a process inseparably linked to the discovery and application of new knowledge, and through these activities, to the improvement of health and prevention of disease and disability around the world.

About The Hive Group

The Hive Group develops business visualization software.  Customers include major manufacturers, financial services organizations, logistics companies, retailers, natural resources companies, many government agencies, and military branches.  These organizations use the software to build visual interfaces for routine operational and financial analysis.  The company’s interfaces are used to analyze performance, visualize financial information, manage assets, assess risk and compliance issues, and more.  The company’s treemapping software, Honeycomb, is the foundation of these visual environments, and has been commercially available for over ten years.

The Hive Group is privately held with headquarters in Richardson, Texas.  For more information, contact 972-808-0400, info@hivegroup.com, and www.hivegroup.com.

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