expendituremap

Rewired State – NHGD 2010

View our project page at Rewired State and data.gov.uk.

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expenditure map was one of two Vodafone-sponsored prize winners. It’s an interactive map which visualises public expenditure data by UK region. Categories such as services, defence, public order, science and technology, agriculture and transport can be selected to vary regional size and colour. This allows for easy comparison between public spending in two different categories and allows users to how spending has changed over the years.

The visualisation uses Flash with a PHP and MySQL backend.

expendituremap is able to visualise any numerical dataset available over multiple periods entered in a simple database. Whilst the current regions are hard coded, changing this is trivial. This makes it very adaptable to multiple roles in comparing regional data.

This was a one-day project to show what is possible with regional data. We believe this provides a simpler overview of regional data than is currently available on Government websites.

Each region has a starting location (roughly resembling it’s geographical location) and will attempt to return to this position as much as possible. This requires some improvement. Additionally, the regions are hard coded rather than using the database to set their names and positions.

The size is determined by setting the radius in proportion to the value of the data it represents. Instead the regional area should be the target of the calculations.

Office for National Statistics Annual Abstract of Statistics data was converted from a spreadsheet to a MySQL database to allow for on-the-fly processing of data. Data.gov.uk page.

By Ian Shortman, Gareth Shapiro and Daniel Goldsworthy.