Mastering the Data Geek Challenge with iPad and “cloudy” Lumira

Having decided to join the Data Geek Challenge was easy but I forgot that compiling a blog post was also part of the challenge 😉 Anyway, here’s my approach.

The following key points needed to be answered first:

• What data to visualize? Just to be warned, my intention was just to visualize some data but not to find any new conclusion. There is already a lot of public data available. I have decided to use some public data of the World Bank. An incredible amount of World Development Indicators on country level for the last 50 years is available here.
• Which visualization tool to use? As I am not too familiar installing software I opted for the cloud version of SAP Lumira. And in fact it was pretty easy, just log in with your SCN credentials and start visualizing. Although it seems that the cloud versions has some limitations feature-wise.
• Which front end to choose? Having chosen the cloud-based SAP Lumira gave me two options to analyze the data. Stationary PC or mobile, so I decided to go mobile and analyzed the data with an iPad 2 and its Safari browser (although this configuration showed also some limitations, e.g. limiting visualization of max. 1000 data points).

Let’s go and hands on the tool:

1. Accessed https://cloud.saplumira.com and logged-in

2. The original data source contains data of 1200+ indicators for 240+ countries since 1960. From this data source I extracted several years for the indicator “Urban population (% of total)” (SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS) for all available countries. Finally uploaded the data by creating a dataset.

3. And right away I started to visualize:
   

The 1^st screenshot shows the “Explore” tab of SAP Lumira. I have filtered some countries and have chosen a trend chart:

The 2^nd screenshot shows the “Analyze” tab. Here I fine-tuned the chart.

The 3^rd screenshot shows the left filter box. You can toggle between display of the left filter box and the right customization box.

The 4^th screenshot shows the same data visualized with a stacked bar chart:

Actually, all these steps were pretty intuitive and easy to execute. More or less I didn’t read any tutorial, user documentation or whatever.

After having imported some data several times also this step could be executed pretty straight forwarded (e.g. definition of measures and attributes while uploading, number formatting etc.). The visualization features are also quiet straight forwarded and especially pretty fast, e.g. I uploaded also the whole data set of the World Bank (300.000+ records with yearly data from 1960 onwards, approx. 80 MB of data) and it was possible to analyze that data pretty comfortable with accurate performance. Off course the limitations of the cloud version annoyed me for some time especially being not able to create own measures within the tool.

Finally, I’d like to show that with SAP Lumira creating some kind of “art” is also not too difficult 😉 But for an additional insight into the data the following “picture” might be not too valuable.