Gallery: Visualisation information web site

This is an online application that presents backdated meteorological data from Augsburg, Germany. The tool combines the advantages of several static visualisations, such as tables, line graphs and bar charts into a streamlined display. The application is fully interactive and allows the user to look at the information from any angle she wants, literally.

Extension of a scatterplot to third dimension to represent measurements on sepals and petals of Iris flowers.

This infographic makes use of an eye catching area graph in the shape of cow to display a ranking of meat consumption, expressed in pounds per capita, in 20 countries around the world. The graph is colour coded to differentiate the top and bottom 10 countries. This is supplemented by a visual key that contextualises the information by giving the weight in pounds of several objects and animals.

This is a tool offered by the Organisation for Economic co operation and Development (OECD) to help visualise the business cycles around four main themes: Industrial production, business confidence, consumer confidence and composite leading indicators. The cycles are visualised as lines going counter clockwise for any given pair of countries. The regions of the graph represent a section in this cycle: "Expansion – series is increasing and above 100; Downturn – series is decreasing but above 100; Slowdown – series is decreasing and below 100; Recovery – series is increasing but below 100."

A "chart of charts" to help users decide what the best chart is, depending on their needs.

The outer circle illustrates presidential periods, the governing party, and whether or not the President died in office. The first inner circle shows the "eras" in history that those time periods covered. The third inner circle shows key foreign conflicts and wars. The fourth inner circle (purple) shows key legislative acts (or series of bills) that were issued. Finally, the bubbles in the middle indicate the average national debt, as indicated every 8 years.

This plot offers a snapshot of several climatic variables for a station. This type of diagram is widely used by geographers, agronomists and other earth scientists.

This is a type of conditional plot where the distribution of a categorical variable is shown to change over the values of a continuous variables. In the example, the distribution of the variable indicating the distribution of the treatment outcome (for an arthritis blind trial conducted in 1988) is plotted against age.

This visualisation enables the visual representation of a correlation matrix. This particular example is about lawyers' ratings of state judges in the US Superior Court for 1977 on variables such as judicial integrity, demeanour, diligence and others.

Document contrast diagrams use the familiar bubble technique and effective use of colour to contrast topic usage in two bodies of text. Gives a visual summary of the content of two text documents that illustrates shared words, words that are unique to one document or the other, word frequency, relative size of the two documents, distribution of emotional tone within the documents, related words based on co-occurrence, and the most common word in each document segment. This example is the 2007 and 2008 US State of the Union (SOTU) Addresses.

This chart shows a comparison between the level of capitalisation at two time points.

Effect plots work by identifying high-order terms in a generalised linear model, a statistical technique. Once these terms are identified fitted values are derived and plotted for the relevant groups.

An implementation in R of the Elections map produced by The New York Times in 2004.

This chart is designed to aid the interpretation of the results of a cluster analysis, a statistical technique used to discover the underlying structure of a set of observations. The data set contains dummy variables.

From the website: "This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble".

This map presents an estimate of the intensity of the flu in 20 countries, compared with data for the last six years. The upper panel is a line graph showing the current and past trends of flu intensity by country. The lower panel is the choropleth map with the shading corresponding to the intensity of the flu. The innovative feature of this visualisation is the underlying method of estimation: the intensity of the flu has been approximated based on the number of internet based queries submitted during a certain period of time. Analyses of past data have shown that this method offers good predictions of real levels of the illness.

This is an interactive visualisation that allows the ranked display of information for most countries in the world on three dimensions: health, living standard and education. The data displayed is available through the United Nations Development Programme and goes from 2003 to 2008.

A chart used to summarise the findings of several studies about a common variable. It presents confidence intervals for each one of the studies considered. The example presents data on the effectiveness of silver sulfadiazine coating on venous catheters for preventing bacterial colonisation of the catheter and bloodstream infection.

This type of plot is used to visualise contingency tables by proportionally representing the size of the cells. It can also be used to visualise the fit of the log-linear model technique. The example shows a three dimensional table with data of hair, eye colour and gender in 592 statistics students.

This infographic presents the final medal count for the 2008 Beijing Olympics in several dimensions. The central part shows the distribution of medals by continent using proportional bubbles to reflect the count. The inner circles of these bubbles are pie charts split by the type of medal. The same technique is applied in the other dimensions presented: medals by geopolitical groups (China, EU, ex soviet republics) , by sport (swimming, athletics, gymnastics) , by GDP and by population. It also contains full information of the final medal count by country and a day-by-day gold medal count (annotated bar char in the lower half). All parts of the visualisation are commented to give an overall picture of the event.

Visualisation used to show the relative position of research objects. In the example there are four brands rated for several dimensions in a survey.

This is a circular histogram plot which displays directional data and the frequency of each class. It is widely used in geography, geology and other earth sciences.

The book of odds is an interactive tool that allows the visualisation of the odds of particular statements through the display of semantic networks. The window on the right displays the numerical information associated with a statement displayed in the window of the left as a node in a network. Semantic nets represent the conceptual links between interconnected concepts. Widely used in artificial intelligence these visualisations have also been employed in marketing and business as a tool to clarify customer insights.

This type of graph is a modification of the histogram In the example, the distribution of the treatment outcome for an arthritis blind trial conducted in 1988 is plotted against age.

A type of scatterplot, this visualisation allows the representation of three variables. In the example, the plot presents the proportions of employment in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors for 12 European countries in 1978, 1986 and 1997.

This time line relies on the use of area charts on several depth levels. Each chart presents the number of stories per topic against time giving a good sense of the evolution trough time of media coverage of some recent news.

This plot represents the outcome of a forecasting model a with simulated data set. The orange region show the confidence intervals for the forecast.

Scatterplot is used to compare of driving habits and petrol prices. Each point in the plot is joined to the previous years point, with the drawn path indicating order in time.

Main source of news and information - 1800 to 2020.

AS-Level Internet Graph.

This visualisation is a variation of the concept of histograms, combining observed and predicted distributions in a simple way.

Saturday track record of three participants of the UrbanDiary project recorded in London. The data is plotted with the z-axis representing time of the day. The time frame in this case is 24 hours and starts from the bottom at 00h00 passing the time upwards to 24h00. Each participant has a time reference icon over the home location, where the journey starts and ends. There is one female and two male participants, of whom the female and one male participant have family. The single male goes in to work just as normal although it is a Saturday and returns home in the afternoon to do some sport activity locally where he lives. His journey starts at 08h23, ends at 17h19 and travels around 15 km. The woman does some local activities with her family and travels in to her workplace briefly later on. She starts her day at 07h01, ends at 20h09, and covers 30 km wile traveling. The Second male participant spends his day in the local area. This journey starts at 11h45, ends at 18h53, and measures 5 km.

Venn diagrams are usually used to visualise the space where a set lies in relation to other sets. In this case, the diagram is used to illustrate the key components of data visualisation the along the dimensions of information and design. The intersection areas are all clearly named and indicate explicitly the outcomes to be achieved when putting more or less emphasis in each area. Readers interested in topic might want to see our <a href="http://improving-visualisation.org/case-studies/id=6"> guide on data visualisation.</a>

A graph used in meteorology to represent the speed and direction of the wind.

The World Bank has created a complex visualisation tool to make available 49 indicators for 209 countries and 18 aggregates from 1960-2007. Data includes social, economic, financial, information & technology, and environmental indicators. The visualisation is completely customizable bubble chart in the spirit of 'gapminder' and the user selects the x and y axis dimensions as well as the variable that determine the size of the bubbles and the time point to be displayed.