A3-RazvanCarbunescu
From CS294-10 Visualization Fa08
Contents |
Initial description of project
My project for assignment 3 will be named WEXCO (World Exploration and Comparison) and will be an interactive map of the world which provides details on demand for any country that's selected (GDP, Population, Size, etc.) and it will also allow for easy selection of more than 1 country to appear side by side to allow comparison. The map will also allow the user to select the coloring for the countries from a list of options (Population/size; GDP % growth; type of Government; % of population under the poverty limit, etc.). More features will be added to the design as time permits to allow for a better interaction with the dataset.
I think an interactive map is the best way to visualize the data domain of countries because it allows for some level of easier understanding of geographical properties of some aspects (Ex: Africa is likely to have a higher level of the population under the poverty limit). The map will also easily allow for people to browse other countries which they didn't know about that have a high military to population ratio or high GDP growth, etc.
Storyboards
Main Viewing screen
Selection stage
(maps taken from http://www.theodora.com/maps)
Final description of project
After spending 3-4 days trying to work around bringing shapefiles into Flex Builder and trying to do all the things mentioned above in the project I had to end up settling for a complete rethinking and redesign of the project. The data for the initial project was also surprisingly hard to find in a usable format as no-one seems to provide a table but heavy formated HTML 'nice' webpages (the CIA Factbook is especially nice since it doesn't even preserve measures between countries - one countries property is measures in millions same property different country could be thousands).
I ended up trying to use a very nice formatted Excel tables with time data about population, GDP and Real Average Yearly Income per Person about countries. This data is available at http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/Macroeconomics/.
The redesign brought me towards the nicely formated data and towards a way of visualizing time dependent data. Because of the late choice I tried to modify an existing visualization which provides good comparison and general viewing abilities; namely the JobVoyager visualization app from flare. The visualization technique allows for a easy visualization of the world's growth in all given properties and it allows for a good overview of the worlds most important contributers to each factor.
I modified the data to fit into the existing data extraction scheme. I had 3 attempt to simply change the reshape algorithm to read in 3 datasets and construct the desired array directly but in the end I just restructured the data with a matlab program outside the program. This approach has the benefits that all the loading time required by the program is within the initial load rather than split between the first time each filter is used. I also had to work and adapt all the filter controls to allow for correct visualization of the selected data and for correct display. The filtering system from JobVoyager seemed to work perfectly at a conceptual level for the task given although the All concept had to be removed as it wouldn't have fit well with the data types.
The time taken for the redesigned visualization was 3-3.5 hours for getting the data to load correctly and fully and 4.5-5 hours spent correctly implementing the filters and making the necessary adjustments to all filters, layout, captions etc. This was possible because of great code documentation within the JobVoyager app itself which allowed for fairly easy understanding of all code parts.
Screenshots
Viewing Population
Transition because of Search
Viewing GDP
Viewing Average Yearly Income
Download
The swf file to run the project: Media:Wexco.swf
The source file (rename to as from txt): Media:Wexco.txt
The archived project (add to flex builder to recompile): Media:Flare.apps.zip Must have flare installed in the same flex builder session (built with flare 08.08.2008)
The modified input datafile: Media:Histdata.txt
