ProjectX Technology

Geo-visualisation and visualisation is becoming more main-stream with media publications creating more and more great visualisations. The New York times have been releasing a constant stream of great geo visualisations, they even have their own visualisation lab on the NYT site. (I’ve also notice that the Guardian has their own http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog also.) Last week the NY Times released an interactive mashup featuring the popularity of Netflix rental across several cities in US.

Using the mashup, you change look change the titles and see the rental popularity of the movie across different zipcodes. Its a great mashup to bring interactivity to data.

I discovered that one of the authors Matthew Bloch has a blog page with all list of the visualisation he’s created for NY Times. Wow, what a great selection of visualisations!

Here’s a sample of my favourite visualisations.


2008 Election results – Obama vs McCain


US Movie Revenue popularity


US Inflation breakdown

Hopefully, as data is becoming more open, we’ll see more Geo-visualisations in New Zealand.

Here are the visualisations of the Google crawler on the ZoomIn site on the 21/7/09.

I’ve made 3 videos, one of NZ , Wellington and Auckland.

Its interesting Google actually indexes harder the more traffic we get !

New Zealand view

Auckland view

Wellington view

I’ve been playing around with Google Earth animations to test its visualisation capabilities. I wanted to see how the google crawler was indexing ZoomIn. Google indexes over 150K pages a day. I’ve been curious to see how it does it. So I created a Google Earth Animation to visualise the process. We’re in the process of uploading the videos online. (The KML is too big to embed in the browser !)

In the mean time here are some images from my animation.

Here are 3 pictures showing all the points that the crawler indexed for NZ, Wellington and Auckland. (click on the images to see full size)











Enjoy! Videos to follow.

Here is our entry to the GeoSpatial Mash-up competition.The purpose of the competition was to demostratewhat different visualisations could be achieved using maps and data from the Stats dept. like census data.

The theme for our mashup is that we chosen to show  the number of recorded offences for every 10,000 residents across New Zealand.The mashup show the number of crimes highlight by colour over the different Police regions across New Zealand.

The Mashup is built on top of Google Maps API and KML. Unfortunately it highlights some of the problems in visualising data using KML. Anytime we wanted to change the shading of the polygon we had to load another entire KMZ file. This is not the best approach in building a lean mapping application.

This highlights one of the problems with KML and provide an opportunity for us to introduce Tardis – our mapping visualiation tool. We’ve built Crime 10k Tardis version using flash, to highlight how much faster and interactive visualisation can be.

How cool is this ????

Here’s a look at some ZoomIn traffic from last Sunday. The video was based on the realtime visualisation of ZoomIn using the glTrail tool by fudgie.org. (They also make the awesome gltail tool)

Who knew ZoomIn would build its own deathstar !