dataVis: Visualizing Africa

We have very exciting news we want to share. We thought you would like to know what’s been keeping us so busy…

In November of 2009, Office of the Chief Economist for the Africa Region at The World Bank led by Dr. Shanta Dervarajan identified challenges of satifying the demand for ‘accessible, transparent and interoperable data of the Africa Development Indicators (ADI)’

ADI is a data source on Africa’s economy, with the data and statistics dating back to 1965 from 53 countries detailing over 1,000 economic indicators. Due to the large volume of data it was only natural that the World Bank would come to the consensus that a new platform was necessary to leverage the potential of ADI’s data.

To address these challenges, the Office of Chief Economist commissioned for a new application to be built. The team wanted something more stable, scalable, easy to use and ascetically appealing.

For the last 4 months BLEN Corp has been working closely with the World Bank Africa Region team in developing an exciting new application. This web-based application named dataVis will allow an estimated 18 million subscribers to access, share, scale as well as search data in a new way. ADI subscribers will now able to use dataVis to generate charts and maps on-the-fly in an intuitive user-friendly manner, using some of the best practices of Web 2.0 supplemented by additional cutting edge technologies, including Ajax, EXTJS and lightweight Flash components.

Yesterday March 15th at 8AM EST the World Bank Africa Region successfully launched dataVis with a great fanfare in London. It was an exciting day for all of us. We at BLEN Corp are gracious for the opportunity to be part of a project of this magnitude. We are excited about dataVis and what it can do for The World Bank Community and the millions of subscribers that will be using this platform.

We know that dataVis can only advance and upgrade any organization’s source or collection of data, if you’d like to know more about dataVis and the capabilities of this application please contact Mike Endale at mike@blencorp.com or visit www.blencorp.com

Here is one sample:

Please go to http://datavis.worldbank.org to see the application in action.