The Atlas is a site housing The Observatory, the master's thesis work of Alexander Simoes. This Observatory is a tool that allows users to quickly compose a visual narrative about countries and the products they exchange.

The observatory provides access to bilateral trade data for roughly 200 countries, 50 years and 1000 different products of the SITC4 revision 2 classification. The source of the data we are using is:

1962 - 2000

The Center for International Data from Robert Feenstra

2001 - 2009

UN COMTRADE

The Observatory will run in all modern browsers so long as they have Javascript turned on and have full support for SVG graphics. This includes the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome (Chromium), Safari (WebKit), Opera and IE.

Note: Internet Explorer versions 8 and below will not work as they do not have SVG support built in.

Adding the Observatory to computer via virtualenv

1. Clone from github (this will create an oec folder in the current directory)

    git clone https://github.com/alexandersimoes/oec.git
   

2. Create the virtual environment

    mkvirtualenv oec
   

3. Activate this newly created environment

    workon oec
   

4. Install the required Python libraries

    pip install -r requirements.txt
   

5. Create a MySQL database on your local machine

6. Import the latest dump of the database from atlas.media.mit.edu/static/db/

    mysql -u username -p -h localhost DB_NAME < oec_xxxx-xx-xx.sql
   

7. Be sure to create the following local environment variables

    export OEC_SECRET_KEY=some_s3cret_k3y
    export OEC_DB_USER=my_db_username
    export OEC_DB_PW=my_db_password
    export OEC_DB_HOST=localhost
    export OEC_DB_NAME=oec
    * export CACHE_DIR=/home/
   
    * only necessary if using filesystem caching
   

8. Updating translations (if something is changed)

    pybabel extract -F babel.cfg -o messages.pot oec
    pybabel update -i messages.pot -d oec/translations
    pybabel compile -d oec/translations