World Bank

New R package to access World Bank data

Staying on top of new CRAN packages is quite a challenge nowadays. However, thanks to Dirk’s CRANberries service I occasionally spot a new gem, such as wbstats, which appeared on CRAN last week. Similarly to the WDI package, wbstats offers an interface to the World Bank database. With the functions of wbstats the World Bank data can be searched and data for several indicators requested. Unlike WDI, the data is returned in a ‘long’ table with one column for all values and a separate column for the indicators.

googleVis 0.4.2 with support for shiny released on CRAN

The new version of googleVis 0.4.2 is now available via CRAN. Many thanks to all who provided feedback on version 0.4.0 and particularly to Sebastian Campbell, John Maindonald and Aonan Zhang. As usual, if you find any issues or bugs, please send us an email or add a line to our online issues log. With version 0.4.0 we introduced support for googleVis on shiny. See my previous post for more details and examples.

Changes in life expectancy animated with geo charts

The data of the World Bank is absolutely amazing. I had said this before, but their updated iPhone App gives me a reason to return to this topic. Version 3 of the DataFinder App allows you to visualise the data on your phone, including motion maps, see the screen shot below. Screen shot of DataFinder 3.0 I was intrigued by the by the changes in life expectancy over time around the world.

Setting the initial view of a motion chart in R

Following on from my article about accessing and plotting World Bank data with R I want to talk about how to change the initial view of a motion chart. Over the last couple of weeks I have been asked a view times how to do this. For instance Stephen O’Grady wanted to create a motion chart, which shows initially a line chart, rather than a bubble chart. Changing the initial settings of a motion chart is actually quite easy, if you know how to.

Accessing and plotting World Bank data with R

Over the past couple of days I played around with the data sets of the World Bank, and I have to admit that I am blown away by it. It is amazing, to see what is available on their web site and it is worth visiting their Data Visualisation Tools page. It is fantastic that they provide an API to their data. They have used it to build an iPhone App which is pretty cool.