Insights

Snapshot

This tutorial explains how to create a collection of insights, which are user-configurable visualizations ranging from charts, time-series graphs, or calendar heatmaps. Insights are available to use as a dashboard of insights for tracking projects, key metrics, or performance goals.

At the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to

• Create a set of insights based on data types available for your city
• Create a custom insight on a data source
• Share out your insights to the public

1. Creating Collections

To create a collection, navigate to the insights page from the side panel navigation. By default, the page will be blank and there will be a prompt to create a collection using data sources. Select Create A Collection and on the following page, you'll name and describe your insights collection, and select a privacy setting to make it available internally or publicly visible when people visit the open data portal. After the prompts, select Create to start adding insights.

An empty insights page

Create a new collecting by naming describing your collection, as well as making visibility settings

Once you've named your collection, select add an insight on the following page to begin making your collection. 

2. Adding insights from templates

To understand your data at a high level, you can select from a template of pre-made insights commonly used for analysis. You'll be able to create insights for data sets that you have permission to access, searchable by data type. In this example, we'll be using the Waze traffic data set so searching "traffic" will pull up both traffic incidents and traffic jams from Waze data.

The insight templates vary based on the data set. Common groupings for most data sets include time-series heatmaps and charts, as well as groupings by type. Select the insights you'd like to add to your dashboard and select Add when you're done with your selections. If you want to add more insights, you can always go back and select Add Insights on the following page to add more visualizations. 

Selecting from insight templates  

3. View your insights and share your collection

After creating your dashboard, you can view and share it with other people using the Share button. Note that dashboards set to either private or team-only will not be visible by the public. Selecting Share will redirect you to the dashboard available on the public hub. Selecting Edit will allow you to modify visibility permissions and the description or title. The Delete button will wipe your dashboard. You can adjust the date range for your analysis on the dropdown menu below the dashboard's description.

A dashboard for Waze traffic data showing traffic incidents by type and a time-series chart

4. Creating configurable insights

Step 1: Data Type Selection

Step 2: Visualization Creation

On this page you'll be able to select the chart type, variables that you'd like to visualize, and any filters you'd like to apply. Selecting Test will run the analysis and give you a preview of the visualization. Selecting Continue will take you to the final step to describe the insight. Below, we'll go through the process of creating a chart for each type of visualization. 

Pie Chart

Pie Chart of Traffic Incident Types

A pie chart groups together data within a field, useful for showing proportional counts among a common relationship. The type field in the traffic incidents contains three different types so a pie chart will yield major causes of traffic incidents.  After selecting the grouping, you can select the variables to analyze the data. In this example, we made a pie chart that totals the reported causes for traffic incidents.

Table Chart

Table Chart of Traffic Incident Notes

A table chart will create a table of the selected grouping and output text descriptor along with a numerical value. For this example, we took the Total Count of all the Notes field that were reported in the Traffic Incident data set. This field includes crowdsourced reasons for traffic incidents so it could potentially show a more nuanced table of reasons. To narrow in on specific reasons, you can apply filters to narrow down for reported causes that include the words construction or maintenance.  

Time Chart

Time-series chart of daily traffic incidents total

The Time chart will display a time-series display of your data, adjustable to a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual interval. The example above takes the total count of traffic incidents reported over the month of January.

Values Chart

The values chart will take the total number of data points for a data source and display that number in text. For this visualization, select a single variable to display and a math function to perform on it. In this example, we took the average traffic severity of reported traffic jams for all data in 2020.

Weekly Heatmap Chart

The weekly chart produces an hourly heatmap of a range of data and plots them on a weekly basis in a grid. The cells show a relative scale according to their color fill. A darker color box indicates that less incidents have occurred and boxes that have a brighter color have higher rates of incidents. The example above plots when incidents have been reported and totals them for each hour throughout the week.

Functions

Below is a list of functions you can perform for data analysis. Functions can be combined to find similarities, outliers, or totals for variables chosen in grouping.

Functions Available to Analyze Data
Add - Perform addition on two or more numerical values 
Area - Calculates the area of a boundary like parcels or parks (requires Polygon or Multipolygon geometry)
Average - Calculates the average of two or more numerical variables
Bucket - The bucket function groups together data like dates or numbers
Distance - Calculates the distance of two paths (requires start and end Path geometry)
Divide - Perform division on two or more numerical variables
Extract - Extract retrieves a time value such as a year, month, and day from a date/time variable.
Interval - Calculates the difference between two time-based variables (e.g ended - started)
Length - Calculates the length of a single path or a trip (requires Path geometry)
Maximum - Calculates the highest number of a variable
Median - Calculates the midpoint of a variable
Minimum - Calculates the lowest number of a variable
Multiply - Performs multiplication on two or more numerical variables
Now - The Now function returns the current date and time
Subtract - Performs subtraction on two or more numerical variables
Sum - Calculates the sum of two or more variables
Total Count - Calculates the total of all values

Filters Available to Analyze Metadata
Created - Filters the time when a data source was first created on Stae
Last updated - Filters the time when the data points were last updated
Source - Filters to a specific data source

Step 3: Information

On the final step, provide a name and description of your analysis. Your insight will be saved and will appear under the "Yours" tab when selecting a new insight. Other people in your city can use the custom insight under the city's name tab.

Stae Inspired

“Every generation must build its own city.”
Antonio Sant'Ella, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture

Have any questions or running into issues with this feature?
Reach us at: support@stae.co