This project aims to create a framework for visualizing geographic and statistical data about Switzerland in 3D using WebGL, GeoJSON and OpenLayers. Try it here.

<GITHUB loleg/dataalps>

Shape of Switzerland: swiss-maps were prepared and openly licensed by Interactive Things. The simplified GeoJSON files are relatively straightforward to convert to polygons using D3 and extrude in 3D space, however it would probably be good to fill the “holes” (lakes). The bounding boxes are used to make data pyramids. The goal would be to add textures, etc., and make them look something resembling the Alps..

Map of Switzerland: map.geo.admin.ch is loaded in the background using the GeoAdmin API, then the tile images are hand-aligned onto a texture. It would be difficult to do a zoomable version until we can move to OpenLayers 3, which has built-in WebGL support (this was briefly attempted).

Population: Szenarien zur Bevölkerungsentwicklung der Kantone der Schweiz 2010-2035 (Anzahl nach Altersklassen und Kantonen gemäss dem mittleren Szenario AR-00-2010, BFS). This gives us the current population per canton, and an estimate for about the next 20 years. JSON was created out of this data using Open Refine.

Commuters: Pendlermobilität in der Schweiz 2011 (BFS) is a newly released report that paints a picture of how people commute inside of Switzerland. We just converted the basic commuters-by-canton table into JSON with Open Refine.

Heat Map: Annual temperature trends (MeteoSchweiz) shows the increase in °C/Decade around the country. We matched these numbers by hand with the location of the primary measuring stations found in the List of changed station names, which we geocoded with OpenStreetMap's Nominatim. This was something of a painful exercise so we are looking forward to more open weather data!

We are looking for new ideas of what data to include in this visualization - please comment on the forum.

• loleg
• barbara

This visualization was created using the following tools:

• THREE.js
• D3.js
• fitprojection
• ParticleEngine (August 1 edition)
• Quantum GIS
• OpenRefine