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When publishing data online, we believe it should be normal, that you get an easy way to interact with it. Additionally, it should always display the result of an interaction in a way, that quickly gives you an answer to the question you had in mind. On these pages we want to demonstrate, what this could look like. The example database consists of 1500 rows listing the marital status in a random country by sex and age in the years 1880-2000.

How to use this table
Initially, the table shows people per marital status for all years and all age groups. Though this can be interesting for questions like “How many people ever got married?”, a more filtered display answers a much better questions. As an example question let's ask: “Were there more married or single individuals between the age of 20 and 24 in 1970?” Inside the block on the right, for year you choose 1970. Since ages in this database are grouped into steps of 5 years, choose 20. Click apply and the table will change, answering the example question. You can get the same data displayed as a pie chart on the next page. And if you want to see development of specific marital statuses over time, checkout the area chart.

What happens in the background
Just displaying the raw data from the database, even if being filtered, would make it very inconvenient to quickly get a feeling for what it says on first glance. Therefore a process called aggregation is applied to the raw data, to group it and only then use it for a graph or table. On this page, the data of male and female sets are being merged and gets aggregated into marital groups. This way you get quick overviews per year and age group, that make it easy to answer questions like: “How many people between 20-24 where married in 1980”

Find out how much nicer this can look, using a pie chart...