UNESCO World Heritage Sites Visualisation Using Shiny
Sangwoo Lee
Introduction
World Heritage Sites are landmark or area which are selected by the UNESCO(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) as having cultural, historical, scientific or other form of significances. These sites are also legally protected by international treaties. To be selected as a World Heritage Site, a site must be an already classified landmark, unique in some respect as a geographically and historically identifiable place having special cultural or physical significance. As of July 2018, a total of 1,092 World Heritage Sites exist across 167 countries.
In this project, a R-Shiny visualization about UNESCO WHS was created by using the dataset available from the UNESCO.Using the dataset and the R packages, data and maps of current status of world historic sites are provided.
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Statistics Page
On the statistics page, plots showing current status of the World Heritage Sites are provided as in Fig. 1. In these plots, number of sites listed per country, number of sites listed per region, number of sites newly listed per year, and number of sites newly listed per per per region are displayed.
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Fig. 1 Statistics page where basic statistics plots such as number of sites listed per country, number of sites listed per region, number of sites newly listed per year, and number of sites newly listed per per per region are displayed
Data Page
In Fig. 2, basic information on sites such as names, short descriptions, date inscribed, longitude, latitude, criteria, category, state, region are presented in a tabular format.
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Fig. 2 Data page where basic information on sites such as names, short descriptions, date inscribed, longitude, latitude, criteria, category, state, region are presented in a tabular format
Data and Statistics by Country Page
In Fig. 3, Data and statistics by country page is provided where if a country is selected by a dropdown list first, then a dropdown list of available items for cultural/natural/mixed categories for the chosen nation will be selectable. Also, another plot showing number of sites newly listed per year for the chosen nation is presented.
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Fig. 3 Data and statistics by country page where country is selected by a dropdown list first, and then a subsequent available list of cultural/natural/mixed categories are further selected by a dropdown list. Results are shown not only in a table but also in a plot.
UNESCO World Heritage Sites on World Map Page
Finally in Fig. 4, a page on which locations of WHS sites are presented on a world map is shown. Overall map in a), if further magnified, more geographical information about specific sites can be presented as in b)
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Fig. 4 A page on which locations of WHS sites are presented on a world map is shown. Overall map in a) was further magnified to yield b)
Conclusion
In this work, visualizations of data set about UNESCO world heritage sites were studies, using R Shiny package. The R Shiny app can be found at here.
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