A graphic visualisation of tax data from The Guardian
It’s been said before, but the web offers some very exciting ways for journalists to tell stories. The thing that has got me excited this morning is the Guardian’s visualisation of the tax that FTSE 100 companies have declared over the last four years.
Rather than having to read pages and pages of text in columns, the Guardian has presented a really useful – and attractive – interactive tool in what would appear to be a Flash-based format.
It is a pretty simple interface and a very useful tool, which provides and at a glance view of tax data from 2004-2007.
It is easy to navigate, clean and easy to read and can be navigated by either the symbols of via contextual menus – nice job Guardian techies!
But the best thing for me is not that the Guardian have done this – although it is a highly useful tool – it is they have followed the ethic of freeing up their data.
The Guardian has also chosen to offer the dataset it used to create the Flash object in an XML format.
This allows developers, media orgs or whoever wants to get their hands dirty (in a James Herriott style) to mash the data up with other sources to create some powerful artefacts.
It will be interesting to see what comes of them over the coming weeks.
