Apps (for various ecosystems like Apple’s iOS, Android and also for browsers) provide a simple and fast access to focused informations. This is true for statistical information, too, where lots of open data are available, be it in static (csv) or database format (API).
Some time ago the World Bank opened ‘The Apps for Development Competition‘. This competion ‘aims to bring together the best ideas from both the software developer and the development practitioner communities to create innovative apps using World Bank data’. (Winners announced: April, 2011)
I picked some interesting propositions from the Application Gallery.
World Bank Widget
‘The World Bank Widget is an online widget that can be embedded on any website. The widget recognizes what country the visitor is from and then displays basic information on how the visitor’s country performs against the world average on the first seven targets of the Millennium Development Goals.’
Plugin Dashboards
‘Dashboards are an ideal tool for displaying, measuring, comparing and analyzing different indicators. They give an immediate and straight forward insight to the facts.’
Development Timelines
This is my favourite. ”Development Timeline is a new web application that aims to add historical context to development data.’
It’s far from perfect, a lot of textual data are still missing. But the storytelling idea is fascinating: visualized statistical developments are combined with explanations on one screen. And it’s Web 2.0, too: Everybody can add such textual explanations.
Choose a topic and some countries and you see the visualization (comparable to Google’s public data). And the activate the timeline with the explanations … .
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