I am still working my way through the data visualisation and communication course from the EPFL extension school. Getting towards the end, I need to complete two projects, one of which certainly in the form of a golem-based shiny app (a shiny app is some interactive web app developed without too much web developing knowledge, namey with the programming language R (or apparently also with python), and golem is an ‘opinionated’ framework of how to develop a shiny app).

I was very clear about wanting to use open data, making the code for the app publicly available as well. Since I recently started working at the statistical office of the city of Zurich, choosing the city’s open government data portal was rather straightforward.

I was looking for a small and contained dataset, as the first of my two missing projects in the course ‘only’ needs to show my ability to write a golem-based shiny app with shiny modules. I chose the data from the emergency services, and from those 4 datasets I chose the two that show for each urban district (‘Stadtkreis’) how quickly an ambulance or the fire services reach their destination.

The outcome can be found here.

As promised, the code is publicly available on github, in addition to golem I also built upon leaflet for the map and reactable for the table. A heartfelt thanks to all the maintainers and people behind open data and open source software!