Open Flights; Mapping Global Connectivity

After hav­ing seen the many iter­a­tions of the global con­nec­tiv­ity map, I have decided to give it a try myself. The maps are being pro­duced using this data, which offers pub­lic air-traffic data in tab­u­lar format. The data is avail­able in three cat­e­gories: air­ports, air­lines and routes. The air­ports and routes data can be manip­u­lated, com­bined and cleaned-up to cre­ate a com­pli­men­tary table that lists the lon­gi­tude and lat­i­tude of each flights ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion. This allows us to con­nect each flight ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion. How­ever, straight lines of con­nec­tiv­ity would cre­ate a messy and aes­thet­i­cally appalling map. By using great arc cir­cles as our method for cre­at­ing the afore­men­tioned lines of con­nec­tiv­ity, we can cre­ate an atyp­i­cal flight route map.

The Map!

The map has been cre­ated in ArcMap using the sym­bol lev­els tech­nique. This allows us to cre­ate a hier­ar­chy of sym­bol lev­els such that the longer more obtru­sive flight paths are drawn below the shorter flights paths. I’ve also taken the lib­erty to cus­tomize the colour­ing scheme such that the longer flights are drawn in a less promi­nent (dark)red. As the flights become shorter in length you will notice that they also become lighter in hue. This helps sep­a­rate the 14,000+ paths of flights from Jan­u­ary of 2008 the data­base that was cre­ated many years ago (note: the map title and the orig­i­nal post­ing was stated incor­rectly).

Full size available here: click me!

Some thoughts:

The open­flights data pack­age con­tains more than 50,000 flight paths for Jan­u­ary 2008 since the data­base was created, however I had trou­ble manip­u­lat­ing the data to pro­duce lat/long for each ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion. There­fore, I am left with a sam­ple of the total routes to dis­play on the map. Notwith­stand­ing the set­back, I believe that the map has pro­duced an effec­tive result.

I should also note that even though this map uses a sam­ple sub­set of the total num­ber of flights, we can still clearly make out many of the con­ti­nents and major regions around the world! I find it very neat that its pos­si­ble to make out the gen­eral shapes with­out any under­ly­ing base map of the world with just a sam­ple of the flights.

As men­tioned early, there are many iter­a­tions of the global con­nec­tiv­ity map. Some use the open­flights data and some use var­i­ous other sources. An exam­ple of other sources of global con­nec­tiv­ity is shown by James Cheshire, who posted a vary nifty map, which dis­play a sam­ple of the 2007 global migra­tion patterns.

I haven’t decided if I want to write a tuto­r­ial that would repro­duce this map because there are plenty of sources out there at the moment which dis­cuss the tech­nique. Please feel free to visit Paul Butler’s page which shows the ever-so-famous Face­book Friends con­nec­tiv­ity map. Also there is great doc­u­men­ta­tion and dis­cus­sion on how to use R Project for Sta­tis­ti­cal Com­put­ing to cre­ate a global con­nec­tiv­ity map using great arc cir­cles here.

Cheers!

Check out the update to this post here!