Doug McCune, in his session at #FOTB, reckons we’ll have produced 988 exabytes of digital date in 2010. As he says, ‘…how the hell are we supposed to make any sense out of all this data?”
To complement his session, Rod Plummer and Lara Page from Shoothill show how they’ve made sense of everything from the MP’s expenses scandal to medical and socio economic data to help a Primary Care Trust, all using data visualisation techniques.
Data visualisation has really evolved over the past few years as more and more developers are exploring what they can do with vast amounts of complex data.
The wonderful thing about visualising data is that it makes it accessible to absolutely everyone – we’re not all mathematically-minded and we don’t all have hours of time to study and digest huge volumes of complex information.
In my experience, most people are visual learners and find it much easier to interact with maps, colours and shapes, rather than rows and rows of figures and statistics.
Having said that, much of the data available to us today is extremely useful and is often directly relevant to us, whether we’re looking at crime figures and house prices for our local area or checking out a school’s performance in the league tables.
What makes this data engaging to the average person is if it’s put in the context of a geographical area, because this enables and empowers people to compare and contrast data on their own town or city with others across the country.
A great example of this is a heatmap we produced last year in the middle of the MP’s expenses scandal.
The government released figures detailing expenses claims for MP’s within each constituency to the general public, but being able to view your own MP’s expense claims is meaningless unless you can compare it with the averages around the country.
So we took all of those figures and built them into a heatmap using the Bing Maps platform, then created coloured datasets to clearly indicate which parts of the country had the highest expenses claims.
That meant people could easily find details of their own MPs expense claims, as well as quickly viewing which parts of the country had been the most, and least, extravagant.
The same principles apply to the businesses and services where data is often crucial to everyday operations.
The transportation industries rely heavily on the submission and transmission of live data, for example, whilst the telecommunications sector base many of their operations around business intelligence data they’ve gathered and analysed.
But one of the sectors in which data visualisation has proved most useful in is the healthcare sector, and, more specifically, within the NHS.
Earlier this year, we were approached by Stoke on Trent Primary Healthcare Trust with a dilemma. The PCT wanted to be able to compare both medical and socio-economic data to help healthcare professionals plan the commissioning and location of services. At the time, analysing this data and cross-referencing it was an incredibly complex and time-consuming process, and mapping the addresses of all the patients served by a particular doctor’s practice could take half a day.
We created an easy-to-use interface for Stoke PCT, which overlaid two maps containing two types of data; one contained socio-economic data (e.g. who lives where) whilst the other contained medical data (e.g. whether they smoke, for example).
We then represented each set of data in multi-coloured heatmaps, which meant that staff could easily compare this data. For example, they could cross-reference the home addresses of breast cancer patients with the location of screening services. Any anomalies in healthcare services – for example, if there were a high number of cases of breast cancer in one particular area, would appear immediately in a coloured area.
Visualising data in this way enabled healthcare staff to spot discrepancies in the provision of healthcare services in a certain area, meaning they could then allocate resources to where they are most needed.
Potentially, this technology could be deployed across a whole host of industries to help them save money and ultimately deliver a better service.
