This post is part of a loose series about some recent Silverlight, DeepZoom and DeepEarth work I’ve been doing, see:

Silverlight DeepZoom as an Ad Unit (MPU)
Silverlight mapping – Using DeepEarth and guided nav
Silverlight Visual Car Search – Using DeepZoom for Search

For the others.

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation identifies small area concentrations of multiple deprivation across all of Scotland in a fair way. They provide loads of information and data via their website that just looked too good not to try and visualise.

I’d been waiting for a chance to use the Descry codebase and thought this might be an ideal dataset to try out their TreeMap control. I downloaded an Excel file from the SIMD site and focused on the first table of data within it. For the purposes of this example I’ve included a screenshot of this data when you first load up the visualisation, simply clicking this will reveal the real deal underneath.

Here's a quick video:

What’s exciting is that this little sample only touches a tiny proportion of their data, apparently they’ve got somewhere in the region of 9TB of this stuff!

You can check out the live version at:

http://simd.stormideas.com/

I’m really excited by the possibilities that Silverlight opens up for performing rich data visualisation and navigation over large datasets. In this particular case a map driven UI for the majority of the data would work well (watch this space!) with particular angles on the data ripe for being picked out and being presented as an interactive visualisation.

A good example of the kind of thing that could be done is another on of the Descry examples:

http://www.visitmix.com/labs/descry/theobesityepidemic/

This sort of issue based page is ideal for drawing attention to a particular set of values from an underlying dataset. It also gives you something that is ideal for PR purposes, as it gives the press something nice and visual to grasp as well as something interesting to link to.

Scotland as a country has traditionally struggled on health related issues (if you are a male from certain areas of Scotland your life expectancy can be the same as in many third world countries) and as such in recent years there has been a real push to draw attention to these issues through campaigns in the press. I’m thinking that this sort of visualisation could be a valuable tool in this area – you may also want to extend it to allow users to interact even more – for example entering your weight and location would then show you how you compare to the average for your region and to the national average, with links to relevant health information based on the results.

Interesting, does anyone know where I can get the statistics on the rise of binge drinking in Scotland over the last 20 years and a link to the AA affiliate scheme? ;)

Let me know what you think!