nicokuz / country-flags-explorer

Country Flags Explorer - Nicolas Kuzminski's course project for Developing Data Products on Coursera

title	author	output
Country Flags Explorer - Help	by [Nicolás E. Kuzminski](http://www.linkedin.com/in/nekuz/)	html_document keep_md true

About

This application shows a choropleth map of the world countries coloured according to the colors of their flags. It was made as an R Language little project for the "Developing Data Products Course by Johns Hopkins" on Coursera, using Shiny web framework and Leaflet map visualization. The base world map is provided online by OpenStreetMap, the political land borders (polygons) are from Geo-Maps. I've published this project's source code on Github, which I've made freely available for anyone to use and modify for their own project.

Map

The map shows the world countries political land territories coloured by their national flags. It can be navigated the usual way, with the mouse cursor or the arrow keys. Also can be zoom in or out with the minus and plus control shown over the left top of the map, or using the mouse wheel if it has one. When hovering with the mouse cursor over the colored countries, a popup will be shown with the country name, an image of its flag, the numeric value of its population in millions, and its area in thousands square kilometers. Bear in mind that the Flags source dataset dates from 1986, so the data my differ with images, even some countries doesn't match with the current political map (ie, the Soviet Union) so they aren't shown at all.

Controls

Flag Features Filter

Check the boxes to display flag color and data only for the countries having the corresponding shape feature on its flag:

• Vertical bars
• Horizontal stripes
• Circles
• Upright crosses
• Saltires (Diagonal crosses)
• Quarters (Quartered Sections)
• Sunstars (Sun or star symbols)
• Crescent moon symbol
• Triangles
• Icon (Inanimate image)
• Animate icon (e.g., an eagle, a tree, a human hand)
• Text (e.g., a motto or slogan)

Country Statistics Filter

Use the sliders to display flag color and data only for the countries being in the selected ranges, selecting the minimum and maximum values to filter:

• By Area territory in thousand square kilometers
• By Population inhabitants in millions

Flag Color Shown

Use these radio buttons to select that the flag colors shown on the map corresponds to the color:

• Predominant in Flag (Tie-breaks decided by taking the topmost hue, if that fails then the most central hue, and if that fails the leftmost hue)
• In Top Left Corner (moving right to decide tie-breaks)
• In Bottom Right Corner (moving left to decide tie-breaks)

Final Words

You can use and copy this application freely. Just don't forget to recognize the involved sources and authors, like me. Have fun as much as I did!

Nicolás E. Kuzminski