We started using XML data from UN Data, which is an enormous source of information on almost anything. I started digging into data about alcohol consumption per capita for a wide range of countries, and came up with a small application that will let you filter, sort and highlight countries based on either country name or consumption. The app is just a quick one, so it’s probably buggy and hard to use, but at least I got around handling XML data in Flash. Click the screenshot below, to try the application.

Screenshot of the data visualisation of alcohol consumption per capita

 The second week, I started exploring other data formats than XML. I went with a set of datafiles in CSV-format from the Danish Statistics Bank. Here the main task was to parse and combine different files into one dataset, so that I could use it for a visualisation. The data i worked with, was about the number of fatal bike accidents in Denmark for the last ten years. Actually I was surprised to see how relatively low the numbers were, compared to the amount of cyclists here in the country. Again, usability was not my main focus, and I know there could be done a lot in this field, so please bear with me. Here my main focus lied in using layout organizers, which is why you will find three buttons, each representing a different layout.

Screenshot from the data visualisation of bike accidents. Beware of the bugs!

Click the part of Denmark you want to see the statistics for, and you will get a graphical representation of the fatal accidents. Red bikes are women, black are men. Mouse over a bike to see limited details on the accident.

Btw: For some reason the swf runs fine in the external Flash player, but acts a bit strange in the embedded browser player. Do you know why?