Geovisualization on COVID19

 In today’s world enterprises are processing lots of data.  That data is of no use if it can’t provide any actionable insight.  There are different type of visualization and tools that helps CEOs and CIOs of company. One of the most interesting visualization is Geovisualization.

 Geovisulization can help multinational companies to understand how their business is performing across glob.  It’s always great to see sales and revenue data on world map rather than seeing it as a bar-chart, line-chart or bubble-chart.  If you feel that’s interesting then continue reading this article and see two COVID19 Geovisulizations.  Good news is all this doesn’t need expensive tools.. it can be done with an open source library D3JS.

Alright, Let’s get moving on this wonderful journey. I am planning to use COVID19 data in this exercise.  Thanks to EU data portal to publish is data. You would have seen static/non-interactive maps showing impact of Corona virus across glob. D3JS is best tool to make data driven visualization.  You can see code on my git repository.

Interactive Geovisualization

   In this first example see how visualization changes based on values selected in combo box. Isn’t this good to see level of impact on different countries?    You can see number of confirmed cases for each date shown for different countries.  Color scale quickly shows impact level for different countries. Most interesting part is tooltips as you hover over map.

Geovisualization as a motionchart

  Motionchart is an interesting category of charting, I will write a different article on Motioncharts. In this second example I am adding rolling-shutter effect on Geovisualization.  Motion charts give some intelligence that’s missing in earlier visualization. Though first visualization is good it doesn’t give important insights. Where COVID started.. how it spread through different countries… and how some countries came out of it while other were in tight grip of corona.   BI developers need to think of this gap and decide which visualization should be used.  

What’s next

  Visualization is an important aspect of enterprise technology architecture.  Level of interaction can be taken to a new level by interfacing same code with REST APIs. D3JS is an important toolset that organizations should adopt as part of their BI strategy.  Finally I would like to summarize it’s importance with Mr. Abraham Hicks quote -  “ You are more productive by doing fifteen minutes of visualization than from sixteen hours of hard labor”