[Yourtopia] Normalised values

[Velichka Dimitrova]

Hi all,

I had a good chat today with David about the Yourtopia dataset (
http://thedatahub.org/dataset/yourtopia-italy) and he raised the question
about the right kind of normalisation for the values of the indicators. The
one we used today (David helped me to do pivot tables in Excel which I find
really useful), uses the Human Development Index formula (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index), namely index_x= (x -
min(x)) / (max(x) - min(x)).

But would this be the right kind of normalisation and under what
assumptions? The majority of the indicators are not normally distributed.

I guess for Yourtopia 2 in the Italian case we're not going to have pie
charts where decreasing the value of one indicator would automatically
increase the value of other indicators. We have 21 regional data series
within 7 categories - so probably the user should do the quiz by deciding
how important each one is on a scale from 1 to 5, but how does this relate
to the normalised values in the dataset? Do we want to have the region
which has the highest average over the whole period 2000-2010?

The Yourtopia team could tell us how this was done in the first version as
I am not aware of the technical details. We should discuss what makes sense
when having regional time series - it's a different picture.

@David, do you have any ideas and questions?

-- 
Velichka Dimitrova
Open Economics Working Group Coordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation
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