On the occasion of International Book Day, in April 23, we wanted to make a geoportal with gvSIG Online that provides some visual information of the current publishing world. For those who don’t know about it, gvSIG Online is the solution of the gvSIG Association to implement Spatial Data Infrastructures and organize information with the geographical component of an organization efficiently. It also allows to make as many geoportals as we want and in a very simple way.

Taking advantage of these characteristics we have dedicated a few minutes to show you the books published per country and per year through maps. An information that we don’t usually know and that nevertheless is a very important index to take into account when evaluating the quality of life and educational level of a country.

We only have dedicated approximately 15 minutes to have this geoportal ready.

What have we done?

1. In gvSIG Desktop we have edited the attribute table with countries of the ‘Natural Earth’ layer by adding a field with the total number of books published per country and year. We have obtained this information from wikipedia.
   
2. Using the field calculator we have calculated the number of inhabitants per book. An information that we could call ‘editorial density’.
   
3. We have uploaded the information to gvSIG Online and we have published it creating a new geoportal.

You can consult the resulting geoportal here: https://online.gvsig.com/gvsigonline/core/public_project_load/8/

At the geoportal you can see two layers:

• Titles: it shows the total number of books published in each country. China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, India, France, Japan, Iran and Italy head the ‘top ten’.
• Titles by population: in this case the number of inhabitants per each book published is shown, a very interesting fact that modifies the ‘top ten’ above, keeping only the United Kingdom in the top positions. The Vatican, Iceland, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, Finland, Singapore, Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong and the Czech Republic head the list.
  

Finally here you have a short video in which we explore the geoportal: