World Tourism Day, and Google Public Data Explore
Today is the World Tourism Day! So let’s speak about some tourism related datasets – and others.
Among other nice functions, Google offers a Public Data Explore in a beta version which provides a collection of datasets from OECD, IMF, Eurostat, World Bank, US Census Bureau, etc (cf. our datasets page as well). It is possible to plot these data directly online, with the following (limited) types: lines, barplots, maps and scatterplots.
The page reads “Data visualizations for a changing world“… nothing less! As someone writes on Andrew’s blog, it reminds a lot of Hans Rosling work with Gapminder‘s motion charts: “Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view“.
It is really easy to use, and a good opportunity for math highschool teachers to show nice graphs to students before they learn how to use R. The pointer to R is straightforward as it displays the same plots as the googleVis R package. For example for Tourism data, the number of nights spent in European countries looks like this in 2009 (click for getting the motion chart version!)
The barplot goes like this:
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Hi,
I just left a post on r-bloggers.com (sorry for the two posts) asking how to make the map with the bubbles you show above.
Could you please post a R-code example on how to create this kind of a map using googleVis? Is it possible to create such a map using my own data?
Thank you very much for your help.
Cheers,
martin
Hi Martin,
this Google app allows to use public data, but not your own. It’s my impression that googleVis package in R does the same, but I haven’t used it yet… You’ll find some info on RBloggers for sure.