WHO Releases Data.who.int

who.int

20 points·orhmeh09··3 comments

Am I missing something? Where are the actual datasets and how do I access these in a machine readable format? When I view the US page [0], I see indicators and excel downloads. Drilling through to some sources I can get csv.

But I expected apis and more structured formats. And some standards-based metadata (dcat or schema.org) that would let me query and find data.

This is ok, I guess, but it seems like WHO would focus on holding and making data available at first and then add on these people-facing UIs.

[0] https://data.who.int/countries/840

I don't have personal experience of working with the WHO, but what you describe reminds me strongly of health academia. Lots of very clever people, all with minimal/zero awareness of how to make data available in a computer-friendly way.

I suspect the data is available as a bunch of CSV files because that's exactly the raw data that has been produced. By hand. Then emailed to someone to dump onto a WordPress site, probably.

It makes me wince. But hey -- the data is online, the funder is probably happy, some overworked and underpaid staff muddled through the way they've done for a decade or more. Why change?

Maybe they're pissed off that, during COVID, the world turned to https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data

Now that's up and CDC and every other nation has one too.

Fun fact: before they got going I already had open source visualizations being regularly delivered to Wikipedia Commons from https://github.com/globalcitizen/2019-wuhan-coronavirus-data

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