For our Humanflows project, we used the United Nations Common Database for our demographic numbers. Anyone who has used the common database knows that it’s not especially user-friendly. You have to go through a series of non-intuitive dropdown menus to get the data you want. You then have to decipher the downloaded data’s CSV format. The recently released UNdata relieves a lot of these problems.
The new UN data access system (UNdata) will improve the dissemination of statistics by UNSD to the widest possible audience. An easy to use data access system was developed that meets UNSD’s vision of providing an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics free of charge to the global community.
The New User Interface
The database now looks very Google-ish with search and results listings as well the option to download the data as XML or in comma-, semi-colon-, or pipe-delimited format.
This is good news for demographic junkies. Download global data on agriculture, education, employment, energy, population, trade, tourism, and more – all for free. Go ahead. Go wild.
[via datalibre]
oh wow thats so impressive- well done to them for making it more accessible and usable! its safe to say its a vast improvement.
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