On the Records: Mapping Foreign Investment

Texas.gov, the state's clearinghouse for services like driver's license renewals and vehicle registrations, has launched a new page with numerous raw government data sets and links to interactive features.

The site includes employment statistics, geographic information systems tools, school ratings and much more. The data on the site mostly are already available to Texans — sometimes buried in various state websites — but it's encouraging when officials try to make the information more accessible, much as state Comptroller Susan Combs has done with the Open Data Center.

One data set that caught our eye is the spreadsheet of more than 2,200 Texas companies that are owned by foreign corporations — records released by Gov. Rick Perry's office. Great Britain* tops the list, with more than 360 businesses, followed by Japan, Switzerland, Canada and France.

Here's a visualization, made with Fusion Tables (view larger version here):

Let us know if you have more ideas for visualizations — and be sure to follow @TribData on Twitter for updates.

*For mapping purposes, we classified Great Britain as England.