v2.3.0 "Uruguay"

2016 Data

New data came early this year! As part of a new data release cycle, we're trying to update our data more frequently to mirror what's available from COMTRADE. As of now there are still quite a number of countries missing, thus, this required some re-engineering on the backend. The country profile pages will now show the latest year dynamically based on what's available in the database. For example the Vietnam profile page contains data from 2015 while Algeria is updated with 2016 data.

Germany, FDR and DEU

Currently in the SITC dataset (pre 1985) there are 2 versions of West Germany, Germany (DEU) and Federal Republic of Germany (FDR). This was for the purpose of showing a long time series of German data, from the earliest year available (1962) to the present. This became an issue whenever looking at tree maps of destination as one would see both DEU and FDR Germany appear, essentially doubling their exports. Closing issue #183, this is now fixed at the visualization level.

Now we see...

Source: http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/visualize/tree_map/sitc/export/show/all/7810/1982/

Many thanks to @pachamaltese and @cesifoti.

v2.2.0 "Norway"

Bring Me To Your Language

In an effort to maximize our visibility on the increasingly international landscape of the web we've now added the current page's language to the URL. By explicitly stating the language of every page in the URL instead of relying on a user's session cookie we enable every page in every language to now exist as a separate URL. For example:

Ttile	Former URL	New URL (english)	New URL (portuguese)
Profile of Protugal	/profile/country/prt/	/en/profile/country/prt/	/pt/profile/country/prt/

This may sound redundant but the implications are not necessarily obvious. Previously if a user were to switch the language and send the link to a friend, that link would open in english, or if the friend had previously visited the site, whatever language they had set. Now search engines as well as users can link to a page in a specific language increasing the site's international reach.

Та монгол хэл мэдэх үү?

One more thing... we're excited to add a beta version of the site in Mongolian! Thanks to @Azjargalkhan for the help on the site translations. We say "beta" due to the fact that most of the translations for the product classifications have been done using Google Translate and these have been known to be problematic in the past. Do you speak Mongolian? Feel free to contribute using the links below:

HS Product Translations
SITC Product Translations
OEC Site Translations

v2.1.3 "Petaling"

2.1.3 marks one major and a bunch of minor updates for the OEC. First off, I'm happy to write that we now have 2012 data available! Yup, it's there and the default when clicking on the explore or profile pages. For the HS data the source continues to be the amazing BACI database created by the folks at CEPII. And the SITC data comes from the raw COMTRADE database after doing some basic cleaning and symmetrizing of the data. A note of congratulations is certainly in order for the COMTRADE team as they've compeltely revamped their data explorer and even added a new public API! (both of which are still in beta for the time being). Having worked with this particular world trade dataset for more or less the past 4 years it is a huge accomplishment to see these changes on the COMTRADE end and of course we will keep pushing the OEC forward with new visualizations and UI improvements.

Other improvements:

• New D3plus UI elements (dropdowns and buttons)
• Combined East & West German data pre 1990 to enable the German data timeline to go back to 1962
• Redirect users looking for Belgium or Luxembourg data in HS to the Belgium-Luxembourg combined data
• Removed "all years" button from embedded visualizations for simplicity and larger space allocation

v2.1.2 "Johor Bahru"

Profile pages have been updated. For country profile pages there is now a small geo map showing the selected country zoomed in. The product profiles on the other hand show the rings visualization of the selected product. A user can also now change the selected product/country to any one they desire. The information that was formerly on the left-hand side was relocated to the right column.

Other minor updates:

• Cache expiration decreased from 1 month to 1 week because this was causing Redis to fill up and shut down.
• Updated D3plus to 1.2.2
• Fixed gradient bug for downloaded geo maps.
• Geo maps now show proper coloring for toggling between gross and net values.

v2.1.1 "Kuala Lumpur"

Tweets now embed charts! When a user clicks the twitter button a POST request is made to the server to save a rasterized version of the SVG chart they are currently viewing. The image is only rasterized and saved if it does not already exist. The appropriate tags are added to the page to tell Twitter where to look for the image.

v2.1.0 "Malaysia"

Zoom Zoom

The OEC got a huge facelift to many of its apps both behind the scenes and in front. D3plus v1.2 has just been released to the public which includes a ton of new features, most notably zooming. You are now able to click on products in the products space to zoom in to that part of the network or use the scroll wheel to zoom in gradually. The same is true for the geo map, clicking a country will zoom you in and scrolling will gradually bring you closer to wherever your cursor is pointed. And lastly stacked area charts show products at the more coarse level of aggregation. By clicking on a category you are able to zoom into it and see more details of the products contained within it. Of course there are many other optimizations what went into this release. For more details on this version of D3plus see the release notes.

The following are a list of the major changes:

• Better mobile support
• Country / Product names are bolded on explore and profile pages to add emphasis to what is being viewed
• Legacy embed URLs now maintain old URL params (for lang support)
• Zooming in product space
• Zooming in geo maps
• Zooming in stacked area charts
• Much faster drop down loading (icons removed)
• Better search functionality e.g. the term "united king" now only returns results for The United Kingdom and not for The United Kingdom and products with "king" in their name

On The Horizon

• Working on cleaning 2012 data

v2.0.1 "Accra"

After releasing the redesign of the site last week, we received a lot of feedback! The version 2.0 launch happened to serendipitously coincide with Walter Frick's post for the Harvard Business Review blog about "Visualizing the Economic Ties Between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe" which made use of the new embedded apps. This drove in lots of traffic and helped us iron out many bugs early on. Below is a list of the major bugs/improvements made:

• Return of net-exports/imports! This was a feature that was removed in the redesign to reduce some of the redundancy in the navigation but it was been added back in as a net/gross toggle on the bottom of all the apps that show values.
  
• Site-wide translation updates.
• Better translations of app titles for French, Spanish and Italian (taking into account the use of the article and gender when forming these sentences).
• A product "conversion code" was added to the product dropdown menus to ensure switching between SITC and HS classifications brings you to a similar product in the requested classification.
• Moved Russia's continent classification from Asia to Europe.
• Improved usability for mobile experience

v2.0 "Ghana"

The OEC Redux

The Observatory of Economic Complexity or OEC as we're now calling it has been completely rewritten from the ground up including updating the database. We've migrated the code base off of the Django framework and are now opting for the more lean Flask. The database is still stored in MySQL with a Redis caching layer. The other big change on the front end is the implementation of D3plus, the open source visualization engine built on top of D3 initially for DataViva.info. You will also notice a brand new visualization on the site called "Rings", used to visualize the product space connections centered around one specific product.

Completing this version 2.0 overhaul was a much overdue project but now that it is released and in the wild you can expect much more frequent updates. One step back, two steps forward. As with any software release there are bound to be some lingering bugs and we urge you to post any issues you find to the GitHub Issues page.

Major Changes:

• Database restructuring, using compound indices for data tables instead of unique IDs
• Greatly improved SITC and HS product names
• Moved Django back-end code base to Flask
• Using Flask-Cache to cache full pages as well as DB queries
• Using D3plus for all visualizations
• NEW APP: Rings
• Explore page now uses the same embedded iframe used throughout the site and API
• Explore page renders top 20 results of page query as table for SEO optimization
• Explore page titles are now translated
• Search box shown throughout the site to quickly find results

On The Horizon

• Better mobile support
• New visualizations for comparisons
• More accurate data cleaning utilities
• Improved translations for all languages