World Bank opens data to the public for open research

Press release this week from the World Bank Group states the World Bank will release free access to data. According to the article there is over 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics available for free to research.

The World Bank has created a new website to access the free data at data.worldbank.org. Skimming over the Data Catalog shows a great amount of variety in the data sets. There are tables on Global Finance, Education Statistics, Poverty in developing countries, Gender, Business, Debt, Governance just to name a few.

This is very encouraging that the World Bank will offer data openly in this manner. Openness can be a great asset to the research community and help drive improvements and reform where needed. I definitely cheer the World Bank for allowing this data to become public.

R package for World Bank Data

A little while ago I posted about how the World Bank data is open to the public for research.  This apparently is just the beginning of what is possible with having free access to a lot of really good data sets on socio-economic information.  R-chart blog just recently posted saying that an R package was developed as an API to access the World Bank data.

This opens up a lot more data mining opportunities and could just be the start of some great analytic research.  I'm really looking forward to seeing what some of the great R minds will find with the World Bank data at their fingertips.  Since R is freely available anyway this merger makes sense on all sorts of levels.  Happy data mining!


 
 Software for Data Analysis: Programming with R (Statistics and Computing)
 

Robert McNamara, a pioneer in Operations Research

Robert McNamara (1916-2009) passed away this week leaving an interesting, diverse legacy to the world. McNamara is most notable as the Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administration during a time of extreme global conflict, most notable the Vietnam War. Yet not so familiar was McNamara's legacy to promoting Operations Research and the idea of applying mathematical principles to help decide large scale organizational challenges.

McNamara was known as the original Whiz Kids by the Ford Motor Company. He used his know-how from World War II to help Ford reduce costs and improve organizational efficiency. Some of his most notable contributions came with planning, management control systems, and developing a recruitment program for maintaining talent within the company.

As Secretary of Defense McNamara continued to promote systems thinking and analysis. McNamara stressed holistic views of management for all types of programs within the Defense Department. He mainly used civilian systems analysts as they were more independent from the day-to-day military rigor and could think with an outside point of view. One notable achievement was instituting the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System implemented by his Comptroller Charles Hitch.

McNamara also served as head of the World Bank. He started programs that would evaluate the effectiveness of World Bank funded projects.

McNamara will be noted in history most likely for his political influences. Yet there will be no doubt about his role in promoting the science of applied mathematics to better decision making.

Where to find good data sets

O'Reilly Media has been a big advocate of Open Data and believes that is where a lot of computing is going to be headed in the future.  I think they are definitely on to something.  Yet the future could be now.  There is a lot of opportunities to find good data sources immediately.  One of my favorite blogs, OReilly Radar, has an article by Edd Dumbill on Where To Find Data.  There is plenty of good data available on the internet for download to explore and mine new information.  These places not only offer great sources of data but many of them offer an API to allow quick and seamless access.  Below is a link summary from the article.

Freebase

An all-things graph database.  The website focuses on trends of certain cultural and interest topics.

Amazon Public Data Sets

Amazon is probably considered the cloud computing mecca next to Google.  Amazon Web Services offers a lot.  One of which is storage of public data sets.  They offer a huge variety of public data.

Windows Azure Data Marketplace

Surprisingly Microsoft has an open data protocol data source.  This data market offers quite a few points of interest data sets.

Yahoo Query Language

YQL is an interesting API that is very similar to SQL.  YQL is essentially a language that allows to grab data from cloud services.  This could be very handy to grabbing data quickly and dynamically.  YQL offers to connect to a lot of data sources as well.

Infochimps

Infochimps is a data marketplace warehouse.  They offer to host, sell, and distribute data sets.  Some of their data comes at a cost but a lot of their data is free as well.  This is an interesting startup and will be very interesting to follow their growth.  Also there is a new Infochimps R package that uses their API to gather data and process Infochimps data.

DBpedia

DBpedia is a wikipedia for data sets.  In fact the data itself comes from Wikipedia. 


Some other sources not from the article include the World Bank open data and the U.S. Census data.