With open data comes missing data. We know that all indicators are not created equal  and some are better covered than others. Ditto for countries in which coverage can range from near universal such as the United States of America to very sparse indeed such as Saint Martin (French part).
TCdata360  is no exception. While our data spans across over 200 countries and 2000+ indicators, our data suffers from some of the same gaps as many other datasets do: uneven coverage and quality. With that basic fact in mind, we have set about exploring what our data gaps tell us — we have 'data-fied' our data gaps so to speak.
In the next few blogs we'll explore our data gaps to identify any patterns we can find within the context of the TCdata360 platform  — which countries and regions throw up surprises, which topics are better covered than others, which datasets and indicators grow more 'fashionable' when, and the like. In this first blog, we’ll look at data availability at the country level.
TCdata360 classifies its data into four high-level topics : Innovation, Investment, Sectors, and Trade (plus Economy). We’ll be looking at the indicators and datasets under these 4 topics for this whole blog series.
Although line charts are great at showing the overall trends over time, it’s hard to appreciate the timeline takeaways and the differences among country lines on such an abstract level. We wanted to see each country change over time using more concrete variables. Inspired by the famous Gapminder visualization , we made our own interactive, motion bubble plot with a TCdata360 twist.
If you have ideas, theories, or questions regarding our blog or the TCdata360 platform  itself, we’d be more than happy to get your feedback! Drop us a message at [email protected] , or tweet with the hashtag #tcdata360.