Show and Tell - Encarta Inspired WORLD ATLAS in Dash!

This is really cool, @dan_baker
I love be the idea and very neat speach audio that starts when you hit the about button :grin:
Is it too complicated to put numbers to the color bar on the right, instead of less, more labels?

Very nice! I remember visiting the CIA World Factbook in school and thinking how cool that website was. Very similar to Encarta and agreed, nice to have all of this data in one place!

Nice work on your first Dash app. Looks like you’ve explored many of Dash’s features too!

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It looks great and feels responsive! An easy way to add a download button is via the Download component.

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Nice one! Very clean interface.

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I like the popover feature scaling according to website…I am getting hard time scaling this as feature in my Dash app

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Can you share the github link of this project?

Thanks Adam. Yes I did experiment a bit with the color bar but it becomes problematic for different continuous datasets and orders of magnitude. For example sometimes displaying scientific notation (3.2 x 10^5) and effectively becomes not very useful as it is logarithmic and basically very hard to interpret. My hack was to change the top label to “More” which just indicates values at the upper end of the colour spectrum are much more than those in the lower. It can probably be tweaked but requires lots of tedius work!

Thanks @chriddyp !

Yeh I test drove lots of the dash and dbc components so it’s almost like a working demo of many of these collective features. Also I just wanted to say thank you for all the videos and relentless tutorial posts you and the crew have done on Dash; have helped me tons.

I will grind on with the Encarta vision!

Thanks @matsujju

Happy to help out with any design problems you have if you want to message me direct. To be honest I’m not sure I’m ready to share this project publicly yet as I have a few little ideas for it in the pipeline. Very happy to share specific problem solutions though, so hit me up.

This looks really great! Kudos!

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Major kudos for sure, and I’ll be keeping an eye on this! One thing that didn’t seem intuitive to me is that More corresponds to a lighter color. I would expect darker colors (more intensity visually) to indicate More. For better graphical decoding, can you use a sequential, rather than diverging, palette? Light-to-dark color schemes usually represent more or less of something.

Thanks @ajr :slight_smile:

Yes I totally know what you mean. From the 93 colour palettes I chose one that is kind of cold to warm as default (green - white - red) but midway it’s a little misleading with the lighter white. If there is a better one you can find from playing around with the live SETTINGS please let me know and I’ll update the default one, which is fall.

I think I can invert any colour scheme too so, for example, the plasma one inverted might be a better go. What do you think??

Voilla!

This is much more logical @ajr thank you.

Set plasma as default, and reversed. Shoot any feedback my way for how it goes. I’ll look to add a button in settings to allow users to reverse colour scale too.

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Ready for Beta Testers!

Hey all. So I’ve added a lot of polish to the site over the last few months including:

  • responsive layout
  • interactive charts (bar, line, bubble, sunburst)
  • button panels for all charts with pop-overs for instructions, and custom downloads
  • upgraded .csv downloads and formatting
  • upgraded WebGL 3d visualisations using dash-deck (deck.gl, pydeck)
  • custom linear colour interpolation for 3d visualisations (globe & jigsaw)
  • search dropdown in main navigation for rapidly finding dataset
  • SSL HTTPS
  • new user guide video showcasing all main site features in high resolution
  • new loaders to clearly indicate when things are loading
  • custom colour schemes for main map and selected chart (over 180 combinations)
  • custom CSS for pop overs
  • client side javascript callback to make tooltips disappear properly

I think I’ve got the platform almost there. The entire navigation menu is now fully programmatic and constructed (with callbacks) at run-time. I’m looking into adding new datasets soon, but presently 77 are available.

Would love some beta testers to give it a run and give me feedback on functionality and things you would like to see in the site :slight_smile:

Currently running on Heroku standard 2-x dyno with 3 x gunicorn workers (3 concurrent HTTP workers) so it should be able to handle a bit of traffic.

Coming soon:

  • new datasets
  • chart downloads (pdf/png)
  • alternative map projections (other than mercator)

Cheers
Dan

worldatlas2.org

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Super neat thanks Dan, I am currently working on a project that would really benefit from starting with what you developed as a template (and thanks so much for your Herokyu guide). I would forever be greatful if you could also make this repo public, I will give you full credit for what I will be building next. Best, Derek.

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Hey just thought I would share another update on the site as it’s been a while, but I think I’m getting close to a proper beta launch. Still have a few bugs to iron out but the site is starting to come together I think. The site might periodically be down while I’m doing updates FYI.

New features:

  • 12 Million observations added from 2700+ open datasets (World Bank, Gapminder, OpenNumbers, United Nations)
  • complete make over (new look, full screen map)
  • floating buttons and title
  • year slider auto adapt scale based on number of years in selection
  • new domain obtained
  • nested navigation menus (still a bit buggy)
  • curated datasets
  • fully containerised with docker and hosted on Azure infrastructure
  • current master dataframe around 5GB per instance and live queried

https://worldatlas.org

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Hey snowde. I’ve sent you a direct message regarding help with your project. I’m not sure I want to make this repo public at this stage, but very happy to help you solve any problems or chat design approach with you direct. :slight_smile: Dan.

Love the style of the links in the header and the full bleed map!

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Hey everyone. Well, after 18 months I have finally had a crack at a public launch of the beta site.

I’ve just published a white paper on Towards Data Science (Medium) and they have flagged it as an ‘editors pick’ for wider promotion, so I guess we’ll see what the reception is like! :smiley:

The latest version of the site now has 2,500 datasets to explore from UN Data, Worldbank, Gapminder and OpenNumbers. I’ve made a few improvements to performance and queries are now down to 1-3 seconds which is not bad. Also added downloadable charts as pdf/svg etc.

The mission for the site is to make important data super-accessible for the mainstream public, and fill the void left by the paper Atlas.

Cheers all,
Dan

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This is amazing @dan_baker . You’ve added so many datasets. It makes it so much more fun to explore. Congratulations :slight_smile:

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