Today, I’m going to demonstrate a simple geospatial visualization in Flash. I used a Scalable Vector Graphic of Germany which contains individual shapes for every district and labeled them to the specific district ids used in a lot of datasets. The common source for data about Germany is the Federal Statistical Office.

This time, I just used the population density which is the number of people living in a district divided to the districts area [km²]. The SVG and the dataset are embedded into the Flash movie for a better compression (800 -> 270kb) and to enable the offline usage of the visualization. The SVG is processed using a simple string-based SVG parser which just extracts the shape coordinates (either SVG polygons or SVG paths) and labels. I used the formerly introduced class PerceptualColor to map the data to HSL color values.

Update: added some interactivity and display for selected details.