"Open data will foster innovation" - Hans Rosling, Gapminder Foundation

Ay all,

 

So today I was looking up change.org as I do very often and for once did not click directly on social entrepreneurship to see if they had new pots but rather I clicked on the Global Poverty topic and found this article called "Children and the World Bank agree: it's good to share". The article talked about a new website that the World Bank launched this Tuesday.

 

The website is a huge (and by that I mean THIS big) database full of data concerning development, aid, poverty, hunger and whatever you could think of that the World Bank works on.

 

It also features reports of over 200 countries that are pages with basic information regarding the country such as Region, income level, GDP nominal and population but also a bunch of indicators concerning Health, education, infrastructure etc.

 

The indicators page is a list of 331 indicators (by alphabetical orders so it is easier to find) from Gini coefficient to military expenditure, new businesses registered or whatever you can think of. They present the data by country and you can look it up on a neat map or a table, sort by year, download the data or even share it.

 

The topics section includes 16 topics that you can select to get relevant data. Currently the topics are:

• Agriculture and Rural Development
• Aid Effectiveness
• Economic Policy and External Debt
• Education
• Energy and Mining
• Environment
• Financial Sector
• Health
• Infrastructure
• Labor and Social Protection
• Poverty
• Private Sector
• Public Sector
• Science and Technology
• Social Development
• Urban Development

The website is really easy to use, beautifully designed, you can download any single data you want from it (completely open source!!!!!!) and pretty much buil your own reports. Think CIA Worl Factbook and Gapminder's offspring with the genius and intelligence of the World Bank.

 

I think what the World Bank made a huge step in making all this available to us and I would recommend you check it out whenever you need data for reports, presentations or just because you're a nerd when it comes to these things... Here: http://data.worldbank.org/

 

Yours truly,

Posted via email from Josephine's posterous