A couple of weeks ago, Peter Brodersen asked me whether I had made a tree-map visualization of the 2013 Danish state budget. Here it is. It’s on Many Eyes and requires Java (sorry). You can zoom in on individual spending areas by right-clicking on them:

MANY EYES SERVICE NO LONGER EXISTS

About the data

I started scraping and analyzing budget data at Ekstra Bladet in 2010. The goal was to find ways to help people understand how the Danish state uses it’s money and to let everyone rearrange and balance out the 15 billion DDK long term deficit that was frequently cited in the run-up to the 2011 parliamentary election. We didn’t get around to this, unfortunately.

The Danish state burns through a lot of money, which is inherently interesting. The budget published online is also very detailed, which is great. Showing off the magnitude and detail in an interesting way turns out to be difficult though, and the best I’ve come up with is the Many Eyes tree-map.

To see if anyone can do a better job, I’m making all the underlying data available in a Google Fusion Table. The data is hierarchical with six levels of detail (this is also why the zoomable tree-map works fairly well). Here’s an example hierarchy, starting from the ministry using money (Ministry of Labor), down to what the money was used for (salaries and benefits):

Beskæftigelsesministeriet
    Arbejdsmiljø
        Arbejdsmarkedets parters arbejdsmiljøindsats
            Videncenter
                Indtægtsdækket virksomhed
                    Lønninger / personaleomkostninger.

In the Fushion table data there’s a line with an amount for each level. That means that the same money shows up six times, once for each level in the hierarchy. To generate the tree-map, one would start with lines at line-level 5 (the most detailed) and use the ParentBudgetLine to find the parent lines in the hierarchy. The C# code that accomplishes this is found here.

The Fushion table contains data for budgets from 2003 to 2013. The “Year” column is the budget year that this line belongs to. “Linecode” is the code used in the budget. “CurrentYearBudget” is the budgeted amount for the year that this particular budget was published (ie. the projected spend in 2013 for the 2013 state budget). Year[1-3]Budget are the projected spends for the coming three years (ie. 2014-2016 for the 2013 budget). PreviousYear[1-2]Budget are the spends actually incurred for the previous two years (ie. 2011 and 2012 for the 2013 budget).

We have data for multiple years and comparing projected numbers in previous years with actual numbers in later years might yield interesting examples of departments going over budget and other irregularities.

Since we have data for multiple years, we can also visualize changes in spending for individual ministries over time. This turns out to be slightly less interesting than one might suspect because changing governments have a tendency to rename, create or close down ministries fairly often. Here’s a time-graph example:

MANY EYES SERVICE NO LONGER EXISTS

The source code that parses the budget and outputs it in various ways can be found on GitHub. The code was written on Ekstra Bladet’s dime.

Dedication: This blog post is dedicated to Aaron Swartz. Aaron committed suicide sometime around January 11th, 2013. He had many cares and labors, and one of them was making data more generally available to the public.