Welcome to our project Air quality dashboard!
We are a small group of four computer science Students at the University of Bern in teir second and fourth semesters. We are working on this project as a part of a class called Programming for Data Science.
The project aims to provide a program which users can use to access information and gather insights on the topic of air quality. We use a dataset compiled by the WHO’s Global Health Observatory. Users will be able to explore the dataset, display statistics about air quality indicators in places and timespans of their interest and even access visualizations of important trends of air quality across cities and countries.
Our goal is to invoke our users curiosity about air quality, as this is a topic important to the environment and public health. All users should be able to easily use the programm. This especially means that the program should be usable to people without a technical background.
As the original dataset contains more than 40 thousand lines of information, any human user would find it exceptionally difficult to draw any conclusions about the current state and trends of air qulity purely from the dataset.
Clone our repo on your local machine
Then we want to create a virtual environment. If you haven't installed virtual environment yet, execute:
pip install virtualenv
Open the terminal in the project folder and create a virtual environment:
virtualenv venv
Then activate the virtual environment. For mac you can use:
source venv/bin/acitvate
To make sure that you have all the right dependencies, we need to install them. To do so, execute the following command:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Now you are ready to test aur little program. To do so, run the main.py file and have fun!
Our little program has a main menu where you can choose your desired action. The whole dashboard is very interactive, so you can choose a lot of things in submenus.
If you want to get specific information about the data, you can choose menu-point 2 and explore the data. Sometimes there is the feature to save the selected data. If you choose to do so, the data will be saved as a .csv file in the data-folder.
If you want to see some visualizations of the data, you can get air-pollution-trends for specific countries. These Visualizations will pop up in your ide.
Additionally, we added another type of visualization. Its more complex and uses the exact location of a specific measurement and plots the value on a world-wide map. This visualization will be saved as an interactive .html file in the visualization-folder. To look at it, simply double-click the file and open it in your browser.
This visualization was the most fun to create and we are very happy and proud, that it worked.