Visualizing Prices and Earnings around the Globe

Macrofocus has released the InfoScope v. 3.0.7 that comes with 2006 “Prices and Earnings around the Globe” dataset. The InfoScope is an interactive visualization system that supports analysis and exploration of a large number of indicators in complex datasets. The Prices and Earnings around the Globe dataset contains information about the purchasing power in almost 60 cities around the world. Each city is characterized by more than 100 different attributes such as the price for food, salary of engineers or the working time required to buy a hamburger.

Relation to my thesis: The InfoScope uses multiple coordinated views to analyze geo-referenced datasets. An article explains this approach:

Brodbeck, D. and Girardin, L. 2003. Design Study: Using Multiple Coordinated Views to Analyze Geo-referenced High-dimensional Datasets. In Proceedings of the Conference on Coordinated and Multiple Views in Exploratory Visualization (July 15 – 15, 2003). CMV. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 104.

It uses several interesting visualization techniques I could think of applying:

Fisheye view

A fisheye view of the world focused on Europe. Highlighted objects in the periphery remain visible.
Similarity map

Similarity maps help to gain an overview of the global relationships between objects: cities are placed on a map so that similar cities are located close to each other and dissimilar ones far apart.

Parallel coordinates view

The parallel coordinates view shows one axis for each attribute or criterion that characterizes the cities. Connecting the actual values for one specific city on all the axes leads to a polygonal line that forms a visual representation of the characteristics of this city.