TV: Trade Visualizer An Educational Online Tool for Learning Trade

Abstract

“How Trade is carried out among countries of the world” a question that is often discussed in research community. Many efforts have been done in past to explore trade, however we argue that our online educational tool has some new and innovative ways to explore trade. Geographic web servers, online web applications and certain wikis display massive sets of data, but usually in the form of tables or textual data such as in CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia etc. We still cannot overlook the significance of tables or textual format as they are the elementary form of data representation from ages. However, upcoming visualization libraries like D3 and emerging trends in map visualization allow us to visualize this tabular data in an evocative way on maps. This is the motivation behind this research paper and online tool. Based on the data taken from Factbook, Wikipedia our tool provides interactive trade visualizations for countries of the world, more specifically for 193 UN countries. These visualizations on one hand provide a summary of facts using maps whereas on other hand they provide an in depth knowledge about exports and imports among countries of the world. We claim that our efforts are unique in many respects and our ideas are worth for research community that are interested in different ways of exploring knowledge and data visualization. More precisely our contributions are: i) Meaningful arrangement of countries on web browser that facilitates users to visualize all countries (193 UN countries) simultaneously without scrolling horizontally or vertically. ii) Visualizing export partners of countries using lines and curves that originate from country of interest towards its export partners residing in the same and in different continents iii) Visualizing ranks of countries for more specific information using animations and physical ordering of countries iv) Visualizing percentage of trade among different partners of countries. v) An interactive lab environment that allows user to select a trade item (a commodity such as carpet, fish, agricultural products, alloys etc) and countries are highlighted that export these commodities on the map. vi) A visual comparison illustrating the difference between import and export partners and identification of countries that are both export and import partners using different visual heuristics. We have developed 3D visualizations representing the globe and map views which allow users to explore trade between countries. These visualizations represent numerous ways of selecting trade partners.