CITES Trade DatabaseConvention on International Trade for Endangered Species of Wild Flora and
Faunaover 11 million trade records...and increasing
over 50 000 scientific namesmore than 700 000 trade records annually
Ackbar Joolia - UNEP-WCMC
Wildlife trade: second most lucrative after drugs
think elephant ivoryleather products / furagar-woodopportunity for raising awareness
huge amount of data...
‘untaped wealth of resource’uniqueover 25k downloads per year plus direct requests
What can be done with the data?
lots of thingstrendsintelligent searchesinteractive, instant, comparative visualisationsgeneric/flexible approach
How can the data be organised?
geographically : country levelspecies level : all sharks -> blue sharksdifferent categorisation levels
trade in hunting trophies
all wild species
What have we got now?
very basic searchnot a good interface
flat results / downloadvery recently, launched the CITES Dashboards
CITES Dashboards
Challenges
working with data as islots of dataaggregation possibilitiesneed to provide a ‘better’ servicerobust efficient performant framework
potential areas of work
Search facility
simple / advanced sets of queryexporting/importing countries
species
terms / purpose / source
‘intelligent’ ways of searchingflexible approach
Visualisation
certainly the most attractive partpotentially ‘endless’ possibilities hereany ideas from anyone?everyone loves nice flowing summarised informationinstant view of trendsidentify emerging trends on an ‘automated’ basis
Comparative ‘graphs’ trends
top most something...drilling featuresmaps to show trade patterns, or more...selective graphschange over time
Robust efficient distributed architecture
current structure not a good platform/architecture to work offplatform that would work as efficiently in ‘real-time’dashboard built on a subsetany ideas? Is it a viable solution?Hadoop / HBase ?Bigtables ?
Integration / Interaction with other datasets / projects
impact of climate change?in conjunction with RedList data?Poverty index?
Sensitivity
wildlife trade is a business for certain countriese.g. watch straps from Switzerland > 100k/yearsole earning for certain families
Sensitivity
There is confidential informationNot to create tensions among countries, or ‘finger-pointing’Should be a tool / set of ideas to outline useful constructive information about tradeneed to encourage parties to report
Other projects...
we maintain the species database for CITES and EUworking very closely with SCITES to encourage electronic permittingmore and more countries adhering
‘Real-time’ v/s Real-time data
electronic permitting huge step to get trade information as soon as issuedEPIX project which aims at extracting data from countriespower of Trade query tool with real-time data
What are my expectations?
Hope the subject and unique dataset is of interestwe could make a big impact with efficient visualisation toolbut also, what about a distributed architecture? How to process huge data in efficient/fast manner?Are there any other ideas for best utilisation of the data?
Thank you
We have brought a subset of the Trade data to work on for those interestedA good prototype would very easily find its way onto a proper product