Thursday, August 25, 2011

Data: World Bank Data

The World Bank data site allows the user to look at and visualize the data related to all the countries around the World. The World Bank consists of Data which is divided into different categories. Categories include country and a wide array of topics such as;
  1. Agriculture & Rural Development
  2. Infrastructure
  3. Aid Effectiveness
  4. Labor & Social Protection
  5. Economic Policy and External Debt
  6. Poverty
  7. Education
  8. Private Sector
  9. Energy & Mining
  10. Public Sector
  11. Environment
  12. Science & Technology
  13. Financial Sector
  14. Social Development
  15. Health
  16. Urban Development

The extensiveness of the World Bank data can be seen by the fact that data within these topics are further divided into many different indicators within that topic. Indicator is basically a property in which some measurements are made in a particular topic. For ex: For Topic Health; one indicator is Life Expectancy at Birth (male/female). The World Bank data contains many such indicators which are crucial to understanding many factors related to the world and to specific country.
The World Bank is an organisation which maintains the world statistical data and makes it available to clients within and outside the Bank.
The data for each indicator under any topic is available for download in Excel and XML format. Further more, it has an API for developers to access and query over 3000 indicators using parameters to specify the request. Developers can use API queries which can be constructed using World Bank's own interactive API query builders Indicator Query builder and Projects Query Builder.
The World Bank data can be found here.

3 comments:

Lavanya Mohanan said...

Ameya,
Please link us to the site.
Thanks,
Lavanya

ameya_gholkar said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ameya_gholkar said...

The link has been posted with the article. Click on 'here' which will guide you to that page.
Thanks!