Project: Interactive Digital Map – Data Visualization
Date: 05/01/2019
Last week, I mainly dealt with data collection and processing. I learnt more about data scraping and file converting with Python modules. I now have three sets of cleaned data in json files – the whale data from Robots4Whales, the shark data from WCS and the vessel from NOAA. After studying the whale data, I decided not to visualize it on the map because all the data points are fixed in one position and thus visualizing them on a map is ineffective.
I spent a lot of time searching for vessel position data. Vessel position datasets are usually very large and not free of charge. I was lucky to find vessel data on NOAA.
I created simple dictionaries for the both the shark data and the vessel data. But as I start to make the map, I find that I need to process the vessel data into nested dictionaries to easily draw points for the vessels.
My data visualization idea is to first make static maps for each dataset with a week or a month as a unit. Then, I plan to animate the maps by interacting shark data and vessel data. The map will have basic functions such as switching layers. I also want to include user interactions such as clicking on data points to read information.