This blog describes the progress of my student project for the course Explorative Information Visualization at Aalto University, Autumn Semester, AY 2015-2016.
I choose to visually exploring the data flows of global oil products trading. Effective vizualisations of fuel trade flows can provide a comprehensive view of international demand and consumption of energy resources and enhance our understanding of underlying patterns and trends. It can also help the audience determine the relationships between countries based on their trades.
An Effective visualization conveys insights to the audience by letting them connect things based on the evidence provided on their own. Patterns, trends, and outliers that we might miss when looking at data tables can be easily spotted using visuals. This shows that information visualization is vital, especially when we have to deal with large data sets. It is built on art and design so besides coding and mining data, I will also learn to design visuals and craft a compelling story to communicate with the audience.
I choose to visually exploring the data flows of global oil products trading. Effective vizualisations of fuel trade flows can provide a comprehensive view of international demand and consumption of energy resources and enhance our understanding of underlying patterns and trends. It can also help the audience determine the relationships between countries based on their trades.
A common way of representing data flow is to use geographic maps which show country-to-country
flows as stroked lines, see figure below:
The lines has arrow-heads to represent flow direction, however it is still difficult for users to distinguish in-flows and out-flows. The lines are of the same thickness so they don’t represent well the trade volumes between countries.
My goal is to create an interactive visualization with filters that allows users to zoom in on one country in a specific year for either import or export. A timeline slider will be provided so that users can move along the timeline to easily discover the changes in the flows over the years.
The visualisation will effectively help users to predict the near future demands and the sources of oil products and recognize strategic trade-relationships between countries.
The lines has arrow-heads to represent flow direction, however it is still difficult for users to distinguish in-flows and out-flows. The lines are of the same thickness so they don’t represent well the trade volumes between countries.
My goal is to create an interactive visualization with filters that allows users to zoom in on one country in a specific year for either import or export. A timeline slider will be provided so that users can move along the timeline to easily discover the changes in the flows over the years.
The visualisation will effectively help users to predict the near future demands and the sources of oil products and recognize strategic trade-relationships between countries.
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