NACE Economic Activity Pictograms

Representing economic activity using pictograms

Visualization can produce significant new insights when applied to quantitative data. It is currently undergoing a renaissance that mirrors other developments in computing and data science. Sophisticated open source libraries such as d3.js or matplotlib, to name but a couple, are enabling an ever wider range of users to distill valuable information from the avalanche of data being produced.

Yet when it comes to visualizing data that relate to abstract concepts it can be quite difficult to find an appropriate grammar to express the quantitative context. A classic example is the depiction of economic activities: Statistical agencies collect enormous amounts of information on the diverse number of activities comprising the modern economy. Over time it has been necessary to develop formal taxonomies that aim to group activities by common characteristics. One major such effort is the NACE system used in the European Union

NACE stands for Nomenclature statistique des activités économiques dans la Communauté européenne, that is, the Statistical classification of economic activities in the European Community. It is a four-digit classification providing the framework for collecting and presenting a large range of statistical data according to economic activity in the fields of economic statistics (e.g. production, employment and national accounts) and in other statistical domains developed within the European statistical system (ESS)

How can we represent economic activities visually? For example to express the fraction of GDP that is related to each economic type? One solution is to adopt the use of pictograms.

An open source collection of pictograms representing economic activity as classified by the NACE system

Open Risk has developed a catalog of 21 pictograms that correspond to the highest level classifications (21 in total) of the NACE taxonomy, coded also by letters A through U in NACE Rev. 2.

Each activity is represented by either one of two pictograms (that differ only in the shape of their perimeter - square or circular).

The collection is released under a Creative Commons, Commercial, Attribution, Share-alike license. It is available for download and use in the usual place, our github repository.

Let us know of any usage examples or suggestions and watch this space for our own examples in credit portfolio management applications!