The OECD, short for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), recently announced a new OECD eXplorer [stats.oecd.org], a very powerful web-tool for analyzing regional statistics. The new online geographic visualization is unique because of its focus on regional and states (versus national) statistical data, its large amount of features (from the choice of the color scale to deciding a percentile or uniform distribution) and its slick visual design. The data is based on OECD Regional Database, containing 30 indicators measuring demography, economic and labour market performance, education, healthcare, environmental outputs and knowledge-based activities. As Hans Rosling lectured before, the economic performance and social indicators can vary within countries every bit as much as they do between countries.

The preliminary version has already been posted on infosthetics about half a year ago, but the current application has several new features, including the ability to present the full set of OECD regional statistics as interactive maps, the possibility to explore trends over time (time animation), to view the structure of regional economies through a scatterplot and a parallel coordinate panel, and several novel functions for presentingstories about the statistics embedded with interactive visualization.

Interestingly, the interface even features the possibility to load and explore your own data, write your own stories and share them with others.

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