UN Comtrade Screen-scraping

This project contains code to

• Screen-scrape trade data from the UN Comtrade website for every country in the world for a single good
• Produce an svg showing this data on a world map using color coding. (These are called chloropleths)

The map generating code can also be used for any set of data in a suitable format

You can download the code as a zip archive or a gzip'd tarball.

Examples

A typical query for the screen-scraper might be to find the total mass of coal imported into the US from every other country.

Here is an example of the kind of plot that can be produced using this program:

Requirements

To use these programs you need

• Python25 or higher (apologies to those using python24
• The python-lxml package

Rationale

The specific rationale for this source code is so that maps suitable for use on wikipedia can be produced. Doing this by hand oneself is a fairly involved task. Care should be taken when consider issues surrounding copyright of maps produced.

The map producing tool is specifically meant to be useable with any dataset. In the context of wikipedia I hope that this tool should:

• Make generating such plots easier
• Make making all such plots consistant easier
• Make regenerating plots easier
• Make changing underlying templates easier

Contact

If you'd like to tell anything about this you can find me here.