This app is a solution for Data Visualization Challenge to provide improved data visualization capacity and usefullness of Crown data with regards to the housing market and condiotions in BC.
The Province of British Columbia and other agencies collect a wealth of administrative data that relates to housing, including the market for housing, as a consequence of their regulatory and administrative authorities.
The British Columbia Government wanted to develop statistics that will provide greater certainty about the state of housing in the province, including the role of foreign ownership, real estate as an investment or business strategy (rather than home ownership), and insights into the regional impact of these issues. For more information see https://github.com/bcgov/housing-data-visualization-project.
This application is the result of the Data Visualization Challenge, launched by the Innovate BC (former BC Innovation Council) in partnership with BC Stats in December 2016.
The challenge aimed to develop a tool to visualize BC housing data in a more meaningful and impactful way. BCIC and BCStats invited innovators around the province to submit their proposed solutions to the challenge. A review panel comprised of the BC Innovation Council, BC Developers’ Exchange and BC Stats selected the five finalists who have been selected to present their prototypes at the 2017 BCTech Summit, the largest tech event in BC and a joint initiative between the Province and BC Innovation Council. Ruby Industries Inc. was announced as the winner of the Challenge and got the opportunity to continue working on the project and develop the solution.
Local installation requires R statistical software to be installed.
You can install the app directly from this GitHub repository using the remotes package:
install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("bcgov/housing-data-challenge-ruby")
library(bchousing)
To run the app, execute the following in the R console:
bchousing::run_app()
To report bugs/issues/feature requests, please file an issue.
BC Housing Data Visualization Platform uses the following datasets:
- Census Canada (years 2016, 2011 and 2006).
- Property Transfer Tax (2017 and 2016).
Census data is provided by Statistics Canada and obtained through CensusMapper API using cancensus R package. - Statistics Canada. No date. 2006 Census of Canada (Provinces, Census Divisions, Municipalities) (database). - Statistics Canada. No date. 2011 Census of Canada (Provinces, Census Divisions, Municipalities) (database). - Statistics Canada. No date. 2016 Census of Canada (Provinces, Census Divisions, Municipalities) (database).
Statistics Canada provides a wealth of detail about the information collected in the Census. Some of the key pages are:
-
-
Data tables, 2016 Census, grouped by topic, variable, and map
-
Reference materials, 2016 Census: concepts and definitions, reference guides and other materials
-
Property transfer tax data relates to market transactions within the province.
It is provided by Province of British Columbia Ministry of Finance, licensed under Open Government LicenCe - British Columbia.
The data is available for download at B.C. Data Catalogue administered by DataBC.
The platform is developed using R statistical software, and realized as R Shiny™ app with the help of the following open-source R packages:
- Shiny™ - Interactive web applications with R.
- Plotly - R implementation of plotly.js interactive graphing library.
- Readr - Read flat files (csv, tsv, fwf) into R.
- Stringr - String manipulation in R.
- Magrittr - Improve the readability of R code with the pipe operator.
- Lubridate - Working with dates in R.
- Tidyr - Tidy data with spread and gather functions.
- Dplyr - A grammar of data manipulation.
- Cancensus - R wrapper for calling CensusMapper APIs.
- Leaflet - R Interface to leaflet.js maps.
- RGDAL - R bindings to Geospatial Data Abstraction Library.
- Rgeos - Tools for interfacing the C++ translation of the Java Topology Suite.
- Sf - Simple Features for R.
- rmapshaper - An R wrapper for the mapshaper javascript library.
- Htmlwidgets - HTML Widgets for R.
- DT - R Interface to the jQuery Plug-in DataTables.
- SunburstR - R htmlwidget for sequence sunburst charts.
- Treemap - R package for treemap visualisation.
- ShinyJS - Improve the user experience of your Shiny™ apps.
- Shinycssloaders - CSS loader animations for Shiny™ outputs.
- bsplus - Shiny™ and R Markdown addons to Bootstrap 3.
If you would like to contribute to the package, please see our CONTRIBUTING guidelines.
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.
Copyright 2018 Province of British Columbia
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.