One of the most popular visualisations in the Global Data Workstation is geographical heat maps. They look nice and are really good at highlighting variable value differences at a glance.

Finding readily available and affordable outline shapes for all of a country’s sub-regions is a challenge. Keeping up with occasional regional boundary changes is a further challenge. We knew folks loved the colour coding, so we did the next best thing and decided to use latitude/longitude shape centroid values to place a coloured bubble on the map instead of a colour-filled outline shape.

Of course, it’s also dead easy for us to obtain missing latitude/longitude values directly from Google Maps or Bing Maps. In the first instance though we used our existing outline shape data, then we got a lot of automated help from tools like Table Desktop, and finally we fell back to Google and Bing.

As a result, we now have near-complete map visualisation coverage of the locations in our databanks!

Here’s what it looks like:

By clicking on Map Settings, you can select the Bubble Map Type and also adjust the scale factor used to size the bubbles.

Going forward, we plan to enable modulation of the size scale factor by another variable/year combination.

This is one of several new visualisations were planning. Please let us know how you like it and tell us what kinds of visualisations you’d find the most useful?