military spending

please download these two images. they were made using freely available data and tools - i've included a description of the technique, scripts and data files that you can use as the basis for further work.

note - someone drew my attention to the fact that russia does not appear on this map! this is unintentional - i assume there was a parsing error that stopped it being listed. at some point i will go back and check/regenerate the map (or maybe someone else could?!).

three views of the earth. each country is represented by a circle that shows the amount of money spent on the military (size of circle) and what fraction of the country's earnings that uses (colour).

the same data as above, presented as ellipses on a cylindrical projection. the countries are not named, and the scaling is slightly different, but once you see africa (central collection of small dots) the layout is clear. the usa dominates the upper/left third of the map.

• sample images
  • three globes
  • equal area map
• downloads
  • three globes
    • raster format (display)
    • vector format (printing)
    • scripts
  • equal area map
  • raster format (display)
  • vector format (printing)
  • scripts
  • common files
  • data
  • scripts
• frequently asked questions
  1. what are the pictures?
  2. which countries are shown?
  3. which countries spend most/least?
  4. how did you do this?
  5. why is the scale for the globes only "rough"?
  6. can i change these?
  7. what licence is used?
  8. what software do i need?
  9. what data do i need?
  10. how can i generate images from the svg files?
  11. where can i find more information?
  12. why did you do this?
  13. i have a comment/correction/request - how can i contact you?
• spending data - how much each counry spends

• three globes

  
  • raster format (png images for display):
    • 640x480 (single globe, the americas)
    • 800x600 (single globe, europe and africa)
    • 1024x768 (single globe, east asia and pacific)
    • 1280x1024 (all globes)
    • 1600x1200 (all globes)
    • 2048x1536 (all globes)
    • 10000x4000 (all globes, very high resolution, 3 megabytes)
  • vector format (svg images for manipulation or printing): these files give better resolution results, and are smaller to download, but can only be processed by some browsers and printers. instructions on how to generate images from these files are here.
    • the americas
    • europe and africa
    • east asia and pacific
    • master (combines all the files above and adds text - you need to download this and the other three svg images)
  • scripts:
    • the xsl transform i used to generate the individual svg globe images from the reference arms.xsl.
    • this script shows how it is used.

• equal area map

  
  • raster format (png images for display):
    • 640x480
    • 800x600
    • 1024x768
    • 1280x1024
    • 1600x1200
    • 2048x1536
    • 10000x5000 (very high resolution, 4 megabytes)
  • vector format (svg images for manipulation or printing): these files give better resolution results, and are smaller to download, but can only be processed by some browsers and printers. instructions on how to generate images from these files are here.
    • the whole map
  • scripts:
    • the xsl transform i used to generate the map from the reference arms.xsl.
    • this script shows how it is used.

• common files

  • data:
    • arms.xml - the data extracted from the worldbook. this is used to generate the images (it is the input to the xsl transforms above).
  • scripts:
    • the script used to extract the data from the worldbook files. this calls the transforms below.
    • the transform that extracts country names from the index.
    • the transform that builds arms.xml from the worldbook files, given the list of countries.

1. what are the pictures?

   the two images (1; 2) above show which countries spend the most money per year on the military. the size of the coloured blobs is proportional to the total amount spent. the colour shows what fraction of each country's gdp is used (gdp is a measure of how much money the country has, so "hotter" colours show countries that spend a larger fraction of their money on the military).

   note that i started this project using 2004 data; the 2005 factbook is now available, but the values and images here still use the 2004 figures.

2. which countries are shown?

   the globes image includes the names of the largest spenders (to read them, you probably need to download a larger version).

   the images are generated from information in the cia world factbook, so any country in that publication should be shown (as long as the necessary values are present). if you think a country is missing, please contact me.

3. which countries spend most/least?

   see the table of data at the bottom of this page.

4. how did you do this?

   i downloaded the freely available data from the cia world factbook, converted the pages to xhtml with tidy, extracted the basic information with an xsl script, generated the images in svg format using more scripts, and then viewed/converted the images using the batik toolkit.

   if you're not used to the technology, it may not be clear "where the image comes from" - you need to understand that everything is based on xml. the data are in xml ("tidy" is a program that converts web pages to xml) and the images themselves are described in xml (a format called svg). so to make the image, i simply rewrite the xml, from a form that says "country x has longitude and latitutde x,y and spent z" to "draw a circle at x,y of size z". that transformation is described using the xsl language - saxon is the interpreter that reads the description and transforms the data.

   for another example, using svg generated by javascript code inside the image, see here.

5. why is the scale for the globes only "rough"?

   in the globes image each country's spending is shown with a circle. to make the globes look "real" these circles are shown in projection (as ellipses), but the transformation is only approximate (svg only supports linear coordinate transforms, as far as i can see, which makes projecting shapes onto a sphere difficult).

   in other words, i couldn't find a simple way to do what i wanted correctly with the tools i was using. so i used an approximation that should be reasonably fair, but isn't perfect (you can see this if you look at the blobs near the edge of a globe - they don't curve round to follow the curvature of the earth as they should).

6. can i change these?

   yes, as long as you follow the licence conditions. you can download all the data and scripts. i also give pointers to the software you need.

7. what licence is used?

   

   everything here is available under a creative commons licence. basically, you can do what you like as long as:

   • you give me credit
   • you don't use this for commercial purposes

   otherwise, please contact me to discuss possible alternatives.

8. what software do i need?

   i used the following packages:

   • batik - displays svg files and converts them to other image formats.
   • saxon - necessary if you want to transform xml using xsl. for example, the scripts above call saxon to extract data from the world factbook files and to generate the svg plots.
   • xsltproc - another xsl processor. in theory, you don't need this if you have saxon. in practice, i used it to extract the data from the worldbook files and when i later tried saxon, it crashed. so if you want to repeat that step, you either need this, or need to work out why saxon crashes with those transforms. sorry! (you have to use saxon for the other steps because it handles xsl 2.0 files and extensions, i think).
   • tidy - used in the scripts to reformat the world factbook files to xhtml. this is not needed if you work from arms.xml, which already has the information in a simple format.

   these can be downloaded from the links above.

9. what data do i need?

   see the downloads. if you want to start working with the worldbook data directly, you need to get a copy from the cia world factbook

10. how can i generate images from the svg files?

    once you have downloaded the svg files, and installed batik, you can generate images of any size in a variety of formats. a typical command would be:

    rasterizer -d arms2-2048.png -w 2048 arms2.svg

    which, in this case, generates a png image (from the extension of the file arms-2048.png) with a width of 2048 pixels, using the data in arms2.svg. i have rasterizer defined as:

    alias rasterizer="java -Xmx500m -jar c:\\\\Archive\\\\Batik\\\\batik-1.5.1\\\\batik-rasterizer.jar"

    but your particular configuration will depend on your operating system (see the installation instructions for batik).

11. where can i find more information?

    for more information on xsl, svg and related technologies, the best place to start is probably the w3c.

    for more global statistics, nationmaster is pretty interesting.

    obleek has a good animated map showing us/coalition war casualties in iraq.

12. why did you do this?

    partly because i was stuck with nothing to do on a trip for work, partly because i think this kind of information is important and interesting, but mainly because i want to encourage geektivism - the use of opensource tools, freely available and copyleft information, computers and the internet to understand and change the world.

13. i have a comment/correction/request - how can i contact you?

    feel free to email me at andrew@acooke.org.

this is also available in an xml file for download above.