Connected World: Untangling the Air Traffic Network
Résumé
People travel not just more frequently, but increasingly far and quickly. Mapping the connections between all the airports worldwide is a fascinating network visualization exercise.
A network, in its very essence, is already a map. And the global transportation maps that represent the flight connections rarely make this network intelligible: on a world map, Europe is often a very dense area where it’s almost impossible to distinguish the dots/airports. Ultimately, these maps (sometimes very beautiful objects), do not represent the data itself, but some idea of the complexity and quantity.
This post (which may be followed by further experimentations in this area) is an attempt to make explicit the network behind air transport. The structure of the relationships has an impact on the spatial distribution of nodes in a graph. Let’s see how this landscape is reorganized without geographical constraints.