Visualisation

The OFF database contains a huge amount of data. So much data that its relevance and meaning is hard to grasp, whether we are talking about individual products or sets of products. This is where visualisation comes to the rescue. With a simple image or plot the complex data is summarised and the conclusions can easily be drawn. On this page an overview is given of visualisation types that have been used for OFF data with examples and tools that can be used.

Types

• Labels which summarise data in a simple image (Nutriscore, NOVA, Ecoscore);
• Bar charts to present the total counts for a set of categories;
• Bubble charts
• Scatter plots to present the dependency between two nutrients for a set of products;
• Pie charts to present fractions for a set of products:
• Box plots to present statistics of a nutrient for a set of products;
• Violin plots to present the smooothed distribution of a nutrient for a set of products
• Line charts
• Radar charts

Tools

OFF tools

To create visualisations the OFF tools are preferred, as they offer tight integration with the database. They are thus easy to create out of the box. The visualisations are limited to histograms and scatter plots. Fortunately the creating of sets allows to filter the OFF data in many ways. The scatter plots have the additional advantage that clicking on a point allows access to the corresponding product.

Third party tools

There are many, many third party tools available, which offer all kinds of other visualisations and presentation options. The huge drawback is that one has to import the data from OFF into these tools and that often additional crunching is required to get the data in the right format.

Some tools that are used:

Spreadsheets

• Excel
• Numbers for the Mac users
• Google sheets

Violin plots

• Violin plot maker @ Statistics Kingdom - allows to create extensive combined box and violin plots.