Zarasophos OP t1_j4p5say wrote on January 17, 2023 at 7:31 AM

Hello everyone! I recently created this visualisation for a uni project and thought this subreddit might find it interesting. It represents connections between the world’s 200 largest airports. The circles are airports, with their colour based on the total number of seats in flights connected to them (also to airports not represented in the visualisation) and their size based on how the number of connections with them. The lines are connections between airports, with their weight based on the number of individual routes connecting two airports. The data comes from the World Bank and openflights.org and is sadly not very up to date: Flight data is up to 2014 and airport data up to 2019. The visualisation was created using Gephi and the Force Atlas algorithm.

Far-Two8659 t1_j4q0qhd wrote on January 17, 2023 at 1:41 PM

If this has the 200 largest airports, where is ATL (Hartsfield-Jackson)? That's the world's largest and I don't see it here.

Zarasophos OP t1_j4q3h4g wrote on January 17, 2023 at 2:03 PM

It's in the middle of the American cluster, above Toronto. The reason why it's not that prominent is that the visualisation is based on numbers of connecting flights, and ATL is apparently not ranked that highly there (see also https://simpleflying.com/most-well-connected-airports-in-the-world/)

Stretch63301 t1_j4rj1fa wrote on January 17, 2023 at 7:36 PM

Really struggling with this concept as well. Maybe there needs to be a volume map, too?

JackdiQuadri97 t1_j4pm1f9 wrote on January 17, 2023 at 11:10 AM

If the project isn't over yet I think also having size (or color) equal to ranking: betweenness would be really helpful, as it measures how much that airport is needed to connect different locations in the world through connecting flights

P.s. Also you just need to push a button to calculate it, so pretty ez

P.p.s. Also modularity as color and then check how good of a representation of continents the components are

Zarasophos OP t1_j4q79r5 wrote on January 17, 2023 at 2:31 PM

Here you go for centrality and here you go for modularity! I had to rerun the algorithm because my Gephi project didn't save correctly for some reason, that's why the layout is different. Thank you for the ideas!

Edit: Just realised that Gephi coloured Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle in with America... I wonder what the British and the French would think about that.

JackdiQuadri97 t1_j4qdi2a wrote on January 17, 2023 at 3:16 PM

I feel you for Gephi not saving correctly ahahah, have used it just for a project but every time I reopened a project I used filters on I had errors and had to restart all over again 🙃

Pretty interesting for those being put in the mainly American component

SecondAccount404 t1_j4puwus wrote on January 17, 2023 at 12:49 PM

It would also be fairly interesting to group airports together by city where relevant. Heathrow is just one of London's 6 different airports for example, so I'd be curious to see a similar figure with places like London depicted as a unified node.