The Olympic Dream celebrates the London 2012 Olympics by providing data on a range of indicators on the countries sending athletes next year. The main map allows you to see basic indicators on Olympic medal totals from Beijing 2008, per capita GDP, a scale of human development (ranging from 0 to 1), a scale of democracy (ranging from -10 to +10) and a scale of human rights (ranging from 0 to 8).

The colour maps depict these different indicators in ‘bands’ of values to show the mixed composition of the world that will be represented at London 2012.

Even though the Olympics is not officially a political event, the data presented here show many of the inequalities in the world with respect to type of political rule, levels of economic development, and the protection of basic human rights.

All the data are in the public domain and the next phase of this site will offer data downloads, interactive data analysis tools, and documentation.

To learn more about how to produce different kinds of data visualisation using our video tutorials, please CLICK HERE

Source data: Medals 2008; Human Development Index; Democracy Score; Human Rights Score