RSSeNEWS to be determined...

Data from 209 countries collated by the World Bank over a period of up to 50 years is now freely available through a new website, data.worldbank.org.

The data is sourced from the Bank’s 186 member countries and more than 30 international agencies, private and NGO partners. For the first time, data will be available in languages other than English, with an initial 330 indicators translated into French, Spanish and Arabic.

Users will be able to download entire datasets or just summaries, comment on the data and share data with social media sites.

The data has been made available under the Bank's open data initiative. “It’s important to make the data and knowledge of the World Bank available to everyone … Statistics tell the story of people in developing and emerging countries and can play an important part in helping to overcome poverty,” said World Bank President Robert B Zoellick.

The initiative follows the Bank's partnering with Google to make 39 development indicators highly searchable and accessible and is part of the growing trend to make data open."We’re excited to be part of the open data revolution," says Nicole Frost, who is working on modernising the World Bank website.

Open data advocate and data visualisation pioneer Hans Rosling said he believes the initiative "will foster innovation”. That view was echoed by Aleem Walji, manager of the World Bank Institute's new Innovation Practice, who said that "the real power of open data is the enormous opportunity to turn data into knowledge and useful applications to enhance transparency and ultimately accountability of all actors in development … Free and open access to data will empower citizens to get more directly involved in the development process."

Economist and statistician Abdelkhalek Touhami from Morocco's Institut National de Statistique et d’Economie Appliquée (INSEA) commented that “right now, there is basically no data available, and it’s very difficult to have access to the data that exists. An initiative like this sends a signal to governments that they need to facilitate access to data”.

Previously, the Bank used private distributors to get its information to 25 million registered users worldwide. "People now have the skills to access data, to make mash-ups, to make applications," said Eric Swanson, program manager and leader of the global monitoring cluster in the World Bank's Development Data Group. "I would like to see this promote the use of data in developing countries, in particular, stimulate evidence-based policy making in our client countries, and stimulate demand for data so that country capacity to produce these data can improve."

Sabina Alkire, director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, believes the data could be a catalyst for real change: "the more that people can have access to the data, the more they can really interact with it, think about it, digest it, and experiment with it. That has very good independent value, because in effect by doing so you’re releasing the creativity of many minds, to be able to create and innovate, experiment with the data, and see if they can come up with a more interesting analysis."