Map View: Trans-pacific connections?

DBuzacott · June 23, 2013 7:55PM

Hi all,

I'm using map view to visualise some airline itineraries. For example, a flight itinerary of MEL-DXB-LHR will draw a line from Melbourne to Dubai to London. Attached is a (very small) subset of the data so that you can see what I'm talking about.

This works great, but we're having an issue with trans-pacific flights - e.g. Auckland-Santiago, Sydney-Los Angeles etc. Because of the way that the map view is structured, the connecting lines do not cross the pacific but instead go the long way around over Asia/Africa/Europe. This is very poor visually as it further clutters those areas of the map, and is also somewhat of a misrepresentation of the routes themselves. I've also tried this with a few different maps (both 'online' and 'offline' worlds) but no luck.

So my question is this: is there a way to 'wrap' the map view so that you can run connectors across the Pacific?

Thanks, Daniel

richard · June 24, 2013 6:42AM

Hi Daniel

Omniscope does not currently support cases where the connecting line is intended to cross the (Pacific) International Date Line.

The data would need to model a line from the start location to the date line and then another line from the date line to the end location. If you need to add in these additional points to your data then you might want to look at using an overlay layer in a Map View.

This would mean you have the airport locations in your current (main) dataset and then an additional overlay layer visualising the flight paths. The overlay dataset would provide you with the freedom to add in additional points without tainting your main (airport location) data.

In 2.8 the overlays were intended to model data which does not change once loaded (e.g. country borders) but in 2.9, we will be adding in support for better handling of overlay data changes. This will vastly improve the usability for scenarios such as yours - where the flight paths relate to the locations in your current dataset.

Richard

DBuzacott · June 24, 2013 6:59PM

Thanks for the detailed response Richard, hopefully this feature will be in v2.9. Because we're based in Oz we've got a lot of flights across the date line!

Since the full dataset has ~2,000 airports and ~70,000 itineraries (and rising) we'll hold off on using overlays for the time being. In the interim I think we can apply a continent filter to clean up the visuals a little, e.g. apply a 'North America' filter so that these aren't displayed at the same time as African/European flights.

Thanks again for your help!

Daniel

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