Comments on: What makes an airport 'important'? https://lahso.megginson.com/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/ Flying a small plane. Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:10:23 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: david https://lahso.megginson.com/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-480 Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:10:23 +0000 http://www.megginson.com/blogs/lahso/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-480 Aviatrix: That’s a great approach when human intervention is possible; unfortunately, I need to find a way to automate the process, and automatically linking Google results to specific airports would be a bit tricky (not impossible, just tricky) — for example, a search for “airports in Ontario” will return Ontario International in California (ONT) as one of the top hits.

]]> By: Aviatrix https://lahso.megginson.com/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-479 Wed, 27 Jun 2007 16:24:22 +0000 http://www.megginson.com/blogs/lahso/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-479 Why not let Google decide? When they are clustered too closely to show, pick the one that gets the most Google hits. It would err, perhaps when there was a celebrated crash at the minor member of a pair or triad, but for the most part, people talk/write/blog about the important things.

]]> By: Shangqi https://lahso.megginson.com/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-478 Wed, 30 May 2007 20:33:07 +0000 http://www.megginson.com/blogs/lahso/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-478 Given your criteria, I would set the mapping application to count up all the points in the specified region and take the top 20 with the most points. Let the computer decide what’s to get rid of.

]]> By: Daniel https://lahso.megginson.com/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-477 Sun, 27 May 2007 18:24:20 +0000 http://www.megginson.com/blogs/lahso/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-477 US airports report to the FAA their number of operations per year in various categories (airline, military, etc.). Sort the airports in the viewport by each of the categories, so you have say four sorted lists. Then show the top airports by total number of operations, but also include at least the top two from each category.

You have two conflicting goals: make your map as useful as possible (aggregated across all people), and make your map useful to as many people as possible. Operations-per-year optimizes for the first goal, while including the top elements of each individual list optimizes for the second goal.

]]> By: Nick https://lahso.megginson.com/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-476 Sun, 27 May 2007 15:24:30 +0000 http://www.megginson.com/blogs/lahso/2007/05/25/what-makes-an-airport-important/#comment-476 My first thought was to give points if the airport cannot be reached by driving from a different airport, thereby solve the only-airport-on-an-island debacle. But if you have 2 small airports on an island this doesn’t work. I think the best way to choose airports would be some kind of population association algorithm. If you’re considering only airports on the scale of JFK, CYUL, and CYYZ then you can immediately discount any airport with no scheduled air service from a 705 airline. Then ranke airports by the number of people that would use that airport as opposed to another one on the list. To be truely accurate one would have to use an inclusion algorithm that included driving, not merely a circular radius for population inclusion.

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