Features:
For this project, I intend to visualize worldwide energy usage. This will be done for both energy per capita and total energy per nation or location.
This data will be inputted onto a sphere, which represents the earth, and various countries will protrude out to display total energy usage. Also I will
need to research how much pecentage of energy comes from which sources, which will also be displayed. If possible, I wish to import data from multiple years
which the user can select to display and compare energy usage between time periods. I'm hoping vizualizing the total energy usage in such a way will
allow people to see exactly how much energy is being used per country in a meaningful way.
Implmentation:
These are the main goals for this project:
| Crawl through data to extract location and amount of energy used |
| Display said data onto a sphere, categorizing it by nations |
| Be able to switch between per capita or total energy usage |
| Be able to switch between timeframes/different data sets |
| To be able to read through various datasets |
| Read through XML (wikipedia) article to determine different energy types |
I believe crawling through the dataset and also finding existing data that's accurate will be the most difficult part of this project.
Also matching the data with country-based location data will also be challanging. Sources for the data that I have found so far includes: enerdata.net, wikipedia.com, google and more.
Enerdata.net allows exporting data for registered user, I have not attempted to download the data yet. Wikipedia allows each article to be exported into an XML file, which could be
crawled through for data. I have not yet found a way to export data from google's sources, but google uses energy in oil/kg equilivent.
Timeline:
02/10/2012- Finish finding sources for data
02/13/2012- Be able to crawl through data for meaningful/structured datasets
02/22/2012- A sphere should display, correctly textured and shaded (countries should be drawn onto the sphere)
02/27/2012- Data should be displayed on a sphere, with correct locations
03/09/2012- User should be able to input multiple datasets
03/19/2012- Different energy type should be displayed