Map your data on a 3D World in Lumira

Hi everyone.

This blog will introduce you a brand new extension I’ve just created for SAP Lumira.

To add a little bit of background, being specialized into fullstack technologies like JavaScript as well as geomapping, I’m strongly convinced that map in general is one of the best support to visualize data.

Indeed, it does speak to everyone, even in a glance. While we were used to play with terrestrial globes when we were young (and some of us still does 😛 ), now we’re just likely daily using app like Google Maps when we need to go somewhere.

Taking this first point, and as I wanted to improve my skills in d3.js (which is one of the best JavaScript libraries ever made by the way), my will was to create something useful for the Lumira community.

Well, I then started to think what – from my point of view – was “missing” in Lumira. From the exploration of the stories I’ve already created and the visualizations I’ve already made, something came to my mind. Indeed, I think most of the time what I produced was missing a “playful side“. Sure, you have interactive charts, filters, etc. Everything is displayed in a modern UI, this is cool I don’t deny it, but it misses some kind of “fun“, something really appealing for the end users. d3.js is the best tool to create clearly whatever visualization you want. So why not “3D“? If it’s well-executed, it can achieve high expectations 🙂 .

Thus said, I decided to create a 3D world, where you could map your geodata and displays measures on them. There, the idea was on the way to become reality. I’ve to admit it was pretty exciting even before I’ve started, and I hope you feel the same while reading this words. After searching for good examples on how to achieve what I had in mind, I started coding all night long 😎 .

Let’s take a quick tour

When switching to the extension, what you see first is a 3D World. No data on it, just all the countries like if you were watching a real terrestrial globe. If you click on it and then drag your mouse on left or on the right, you’ll see it rotating.

Well, this is nice, but the point of Lumira is to create visualizations from your data, to get insights on it.

Let’s add some points on the 3D World.

In order to do so, you have to have two dimensions in your dataset, one containing Longitude values and the other one containing Latitude values.

You just place them in the dimension input and you see points displaying over the globe.

Right now, you already have a useful insight in front of your eyes. For example, this could be use in a story with a title like “Our customers all over the world”. That would bring “ludic” to the story, and this was exactly my point while creating this extension : make something useful and ludic at the same time.

You can also add measures to the points you just set. The first indicator – placed in the Measures/Size input – will impact the size of the points on the map according to their respective measure value.

The second indicator – placed in the Measures/Color input – will impact point colors on the map according to each point respective measure value. By default, the colors will go to yellow to red the higher the values are.

And of course, you can fill both measures inputs at the same time with two different measures, one for the size and another one for the color.

That’s pretty much it. I wanted the extension to be really simple to use. No curlicue.

And to finish, this is what you can get when you use the visualization you’ve just created in Lumira stories.

And there is a good news! This extension is open-sourced 🙂 .

Meaning that if you want to change the ocean color, or the defaut ramp colors, go ahead and fork the repository from GitHub.

I also plan to support it for quite a while, and maybe improve it a bit when I’ve some more free time.

As an appendix to this blog, if you are interested in further geomapping solutions for Lumira in order to visualize more complex data or use cases, check out the extension we’ve developped where I work : Galigeo for Lumira.

I also want to thank my current company Galigeo where I learnt (and keep learning!) a lot about geomapping, as well as Ganaël Jatteau who made some of the functions I use in the extension (to calculate points size according to a measure for example).

That’s it guys, I hope you’ll enjoy it.

As usually, if you have any feedback or idea for this custom extension, leave a comment there or open a ticket on the GitHub page of the project.

Cheers,

Vincent