GED VIZ – Visualizing Global Economic Relations

GED VIZ lets you create and share visualizations of global economic relations - for research, teaching and storytelling.

The online version: viz.ged-project.de

Watch the video to see how it works.

Questions or remarks? Send us your feedback!

Implementation

GED VIZ is a data visualization tool that uses open web technologies like HTML5, CSS, SVG, JavaScript and JSON. In particular, GED VIZ is a Ruby on Rails application using a MySQL database. The client side part is written in JavaScript/CoffeeScript using Backbone.js, Chaplin.js and Raphael.js.

There is a detailed blog post on the implementation.

Dependencies

• Ruby 1.9.3 (MRI) with RubyGems. Also works with Ruby 2.1.
• MySQL 5.1 or newer
• PhantomJS for generating static images for slide previews, exporting and older browsers

Installation

After cloning the repository, open a shell console, change to the GED-VIZ directory and enter these commands:

• gem install bundler
• bundle install
• Adjust config/database.yml to your database configuration. You might use config/database.yml.sample as a template.
• rake db:create db:migrate db:seed
  This creates the database and imports the data. This may take several minutes.
• Start the local development server:
  rails server

This software is open source, but the trademark “GED VIZ” and the logos are not covered by the MIT license. If you deploy the software on an Internet or Intranet server, please replace these terms and logos with your own. See LICENSE.md for further instructions.

About

The “Global Economic Dynamics” (GED) project of the Bertelsmann Foundation aims to contribute to a better understanding of the growing complexity of economic developments.

Project manager: Dr. Jan Arpe

Visualization concept & UI design: Raureif and Prof. Boris Müller

Data support: Prognos

Software Development: 9elements

Technical and security contact: Mathias Schäfer, mathias.schaefer@9elements.com, @molily