Category Archives: Open Data

Government Open Data Visualizations

What Does Your Country Export? – [VISUALIZATION]

The Observatory of Economic Complexity describes itself as a tool that allows users to quickly compose a visual narrative about countries and the products they exchange. Their superb interactive visualization below shows the makeup of Ireland’s 2010 exports.

For the full story of how the country’s exports have changed since 1962 (from 23% live cattle to current 2.1%) , check out the full interactive at The Observatory of Economic Complexity.

It provides:

The observatory provides access to bilateral trade data for roughly 200 countries, 50 years and 1000 different products of the SITC4 revision 2 classification.

The source for the data

1962 – 2000: The Center for International Data from Robert Feenstra

2001 – 2009: UN COMTRADE

The source code for the visualizations is available on github and you can access the data via an API.

(h/t Worldbank)

Open Data Visualizations

World Bank on Tumblr – [VISUALIZATION]

The World Bank just launched a new Data Visualization Tumblr blog dedicated to the latest and greatest open data visualizations on the fight against poverty.

The blog is part of the bank’s Open Data Initiative and will feature “open data visualizations made by economists, graphic artists and all of you open data enthusiasts from both inside and outside the Bank”.

The first visualization presented on the site details Global Poverty Trends and was created using the bank’s re-vamped version of PovcalNet: an interactive on-line computational poverty analysis tool. The team downloaded the table with regional poverty estimates and then used PovcalNet to calculate the results for additional poverty lines. They then combined all the data in the three-panel visualization below – for full interactive version of the chart check out Seeing Between the Lines: Visualizing Global Poverty Trends .

Visualizing Poverty trends