Agile Data Science 2.0

Chapter 6. Exploring Data with Reports

In the next step, our third agile sprint, we’ll extend our chart pages into full-blown reports. In this step, charts become interactive, static pages become dynamic, and our data becomes explorable through networks of linked, related entities with tables and charts. These are the characteristics of the reports stage of the data-value pyramid (Figure 6-1).

Figure 6-1. Level 3: exploring with reports

Code examples for this chapter are available at Agile_Data_Code_2/tree/master/ch06. Clone the repository and follow along!

git clone https://github.com/rjurney/Agile_Data_Code_2.git

Extracting Airlines (Entities)

To build a report, we need to compose multiple views of our dataset. Building these views corresponds with enumerating entities. The entity we created in the previous chapter, airplanes, will serve as a foundation as we increase the number of entities and the corresponding links between them to create reports. As with the last chapter, before we can start creating different views on our data, we need a web page to put our charts and tables into. So let’s create another entity, airlines, and give each a page of its own.

We start by gathering all tail numbers for a given airline in a table on its entity page. Every commercial flight has an airline it operates under, and each airline has a fleet of beautifully branded airplanes that, along with airport ...