Assignment Detail

Assignment – Data Visualisation Application

Learning Outcome 1: Design, implement and test database-driven applications using industry-standard techniques, technologies and best practices.

The Task

Governments around the world are releasing a huge amount of open data – on everything from spending through to crime and health. It is now possible to compare national, regional, and city-wide data from hundreds of locations around the world.

However, the data is often just released in tabular form and this is not always the best way of presenting the data. Your task in this assignment is to pick one dataset from any government open data website and create an application that dynamically provides a visualisation for that data that makes it much easier to understand the impact of the data.

Your application must contain the following:

1. A client component that is either:

a. A web site. You may make this using just client-side technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc) or you may also contain some server-side components written in PHP.
or:

b. A Windows or mobile application written using any language you wish, but it must provide a graphical user interface. You may use Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) or any other graphical toolkit for the graphical user interface.

2. A server component that is a web service that implements a REST or SOAP API that must be used by your client. The web service must retrieve the data to be visualised from a relational database. Data must be transferred between the client and web service in either JSON or XML format.

3. The visualisation must be generated dynamically at run-time using data supplied by the web service.

4. All server components (both the web service and any server components of the web site if you create a client web site) must be written in PHP and must be published on the virtual machine running on the Azure resource group that has assigned to you for this module.

5. If you provide a Windows client, you must provide a URL on your virtual machine from which a user can download the client executable and any other required files packaged inside a zip file. You may assume that it will run on a machine that has Visual Studio 2019or later installed (so you do not need to provide a copy of the .NET Framework or a C runtime system), but any other component required must be included in the zip file.

You are free to provide any form of visualisation of the data source you choose to use. To give you some ideas, here are some possibilities, but you are not restricted to these:
• A game that varies its behaviour depending on the data in the data source;
• If the data is geographical data, you might choose to display it as locations on a map;
• You could choose to represent it graphically on a chart or other form of graph.
You must also include with your submission a report about your site that includes the following:
• The URL of your web site or where the client can be downloaded from;
• The URL of the source of the original data;
• A description of any particularly innovative features of your application or the visualisation created;
• An implementation log or diary that details the work done on this assignment.Each entry in the diary should be in the following format