UNdata and GeoJoin
July 14th, 2010by Kate Chapman
About the Author: Kate is the Developer Community Lead at FortiusOne she is focused on evangelizing the GeoCommons platform to coders for use in their own applications. She can best be tracked on Twitter as @wonderchook Read more from this author
Recently the United Nations Statistics Division released UNdata a catalog of a variety of UN data. In the about page it is described as “This database service is part of a project launched by UNSD in 2005, called “Statistics as a Public Good”, whose objectives are to provide free access to global statistics, to educate users about the importance of statistics for evidence-based policy and decision-making and to assist National Statistical Offices of Member Countries to strengthen their data dissemination capabilities.” Clearly meeting “An Open Data Litmus Test” there is a download button. As soon as I discovered UNdata I began searching for data and using it within GeoCommons.
First I selected a dataset I was interested in. In this example I picked “Years of Life Lost to Communicable Diseases (%).” I downloaded the data as a CSV and then uploaded it using Finder. Since the data did not have geographic boundaries I utilized GeoJoin. First I selected World Boundaries and used the name column to join the UNdata to the boundary dataset.
Next I selected the columns I wanted to join by selecting “country or area” in my dataset and “Name” in the country boundaries.
Only 163 of 191 features matched, but I decided it was okay to continue on and make a map. I first added metadata and then clicked the “Make a Map” link. Below is my final result. If you decide to upload data yourself or make a map please tag is “UNdata” so we can aggregate them together.
Popularity: 5% [?]
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