Exceptionally designed data visualizations can positively impact a project in ways which are difficult to explain. Detailed temporal data associated with cameras, laid out in an intuitive way, help lead to the identification and effective communication of issues across the entire project which were otherwise unexplainable. With consistency in understanding of the issues, resolution were quickly able to be decided upon and implemented.
Even a well designed relational database will inherently have issues with visibility from various perspectives. This is often due to the fact that databases are optimized for write and continuity performance, not readability from the analysis perspective. However, there is often a need to dive deep from a different perspective to see where issues may be happening on the front lines.
For this reason I designed a suite of report building R scripts which would gather all necessary information about a given object, a camera in this case, and summarize it's database lifespan. In particular, I wanted to answer a few different questions:
1. What dates are associated with a camera and what story do they tell in time?
2. Which time periods was this camera supposed to be taking pictures?
3. Which time periods do we have usable camera coverage from?
4. Are there any time periods which don't make sense?
All 4 of these questions can be answered via the camera detail report, in particular a single graphic made. This detailed report was instrumental in determining and effectively communicating multiple data processing issues. These issues were then quite easy to identify and remedy.
This process was replicated across multiple data structures to continue to identify and communicate issues to all stakeholders.
