Understanding the patterns: Business Data added in NepalMap

01 Sep 2017 - Nikesh Balami

As the use and impact of NepalMap increases day by day, we at Code for Nepal are working hard to make sure the users are getting direct benefits by publishing new stories with facts, adding new datasets and teaching people how to use it through events. NepalMap aims to make data on Nepal more accessible and understandable by creating user-friendly data visualizations on key demographic issues.

After adding Local Election Data at NepalMap, We recently added the business data so that users can get the whole overview and growth rate of business in Nepal. A year ago, Office of Company Registrar Nepal embarked the OCR Open Government Data (OGD) initiative to increase access to company data and wants to create an ecosystem of OGD to increase the usability of data and realize the benefits. They opened the data regarding company registration from 2002 till 2072 BS for download and reuse in CSV and XML format.

Despite huge possibilities of data-based storytelling, only a few had used those sources of data. So, we decided to feature the data in NepalMap.

To find the right pattern to present business data at NepalMap, We go through different phases just to make sure the data visualization we create can be easily understandable and meaningful.

First Phase: Sorting the whole dataset

In the first phase we analysis the whole available datasets and sorted it according to the year wise and districts wise. For this we replace the district code with district name and removed the other unwanted parts, this gave us an opportunity to understand the company data better. All the filtered and sorted datasets are in available openly at GitHub for reuse.

Second Phase: Finding the patterns to present the data

For this we used 10 years long civil war as our key point, Keeping the date of civil war as a break point, we divided the whole datasets into three parts: before the civil war, during the civil war, and after civil war.

We also present data according to a decade and its business types: Private, Public, Foreign and Non-profit.

Third Phase: Presenting the data

We used Bar Charts to present both Era and Decade data, although we had some discussion of using Histogram for presentation. Let us know if you think presenting this data in different visualization would be better.

We are also looking for some others sources of data which can be featured at NepalMap, let us know what kinds of datasets would you like to see at NepalMap next.