Our World in Data: Using Data to See the World

OurWorldinData is a research institution and open-source data platform that focuses on using public data sources to study various issues related to global development and sustainable development. This institution provides various data charts, research, and articles to help people better understand development trends and challenges around the world.

Here are a few detailed introductions about OurWorldinData:

1. Data source: OurWorldinData uses various public data sources, including international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization, as well as governments, research institutions, and civil society organizations. These data cover multiple areas such as poverty, education, health, climate change, and technological development.

2. Data Visualization: OurWorldinData places great emphasis on data visualization, presenting complex data in a more intuitive and understandable way through various charts, maps, and interactive tools. Users can view various data charts on the platform and compare and analyze them.

3. Research content: OurWorldinData has a wide range of research topics, including global poverty and inequality, education accessibility, gender equality, global health, climate change, and renewable energy. The institution also frequently collaborates with various international organizations, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations to jointly carry out research projects.

4. Open source platform: OurWorldinData is an open source platform, which means anyone can view and download its data, and use its code and tools for secondary development. This helps promote transparency and traceability of data, as well as drive the development of global data openness and data science.

Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, survival risks, and inequality: the world is facing many enormous and terrifying problems. It is precisely these major issues that we are concerned about in our work in 'Our Data World'.

Thanks to the work of thousands of researchers around the world who have devoted their entire lives to this field, we often have a good understanding of how to make progress in solving the major problems we face. The world has resources to do better and reduce suffering in the world.

We believe that a key reason why we have not been able to make the progress we can is that we have not fully utilized existing research and data: important knowledge is often stored in inaccessible databases, locked behind paywalls, and obscured by jargon in academic papers.

Our goal is to make knowledge about major issues easily accessible and understandable. As we stated on our homepage, the mission of our data world is to publish 'research and data to solve the world's biggest problems'.

A publication aimed at understanding major global issues and the powerful changes reshaping our world

If you want to contribute to a better future, you need to understand the problems facing the world. To understand these issues, relying solely on daily news is not enough. The news media focuses on events, so to a large extent, they do not report on the two aspects that "Our Data World" focuses on: major issues that will continue to face for centuries or longer, and the lasting and powerful changes that are gradually reshaping our world.

The standard for selecting the content we focus on in news is whether it is novel or not. The standard by which we decide what to focus on in the data world is whether it is important or not.

The front page of 'Our Data World' lists the same global issues every day because they are important every day. One of the biggest mistakes made by news media is thinking that different things are important on different days.

To understand the issues that affect billions of people, we need data. We need to carefully weigh what we care about and publish the results on an understandable public platform. This allows everyone to see the current state of the world and track where we have made progress and where we are falling behind. The publication we are building is aimed at this goal. Through interactive data visualization, we can see how the world is changing; By summarizing scientific literature, we can understand why.

Changing the world is possible

In order to achieve a better future, we also need to understand how and why the world is changing.

Historical data and research indicate that changing the world is possible. Historical research shows that up until several generations ago, approximately half of newborns died during childhood. Since then, the health status of children around the world has rapidly improved, and life expectancy has doubled in all regions. It is possible to make progress.

In other important aspects, global living conditions have also improved. Although we consider this to be one of the most important facts about the world we live in, few people know about it.

On the contrary, many people believe that global living conditions are stagnating or deteriorating, and most news media reports hardly question this view. It is wrong to believe that a person can only understand the world by focusing on news, and media attention to a single event and wrong things may mean that well intentioned people who want to contribute to positive change will be at a loss, desperate, cynical, and in the worst case, give up their ideals. Over the years, most of our efforts have been dedicated to addressing this threat.

Studying how to make progress on past major issues can enable us to learn. Progress is possible, but not inevitable. If we want to know how to reduce pain and solve world problems, we should learn from past successes.

A comprehensive view of global living conditions and the Earth's environment

Our perspective is broad, covering a wide range of aspects that are crucial to our lives. Merely measuring economic growth is not enough. Our Data World's research publications are dedicated to addressing a range of global issues such as health, education, violence, political power, human rights, war, poverty, inequality, energy, hunger, and human impact on the environment. On the homepage, we list all the global issues and significant long-term changes that we have researched. The complete list of aspects we ultimately want to cover is longer and can be found here.

It is evident from our publications that we are committed to providing a global perspective, but our focus is on the living conditions of the poorest populations.

Covering all these aspects in one resource can help understand how long-term global trends are interconnected.

Measuring what is important

On the tightly integrated website SDGTracker.org, we showcase data and research on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In 2015, all countries in the world signed an agreement to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, and we built this website to track progress towards achieving these goals. Our Sustainable Development Goal Tracker is a widely accessible publication that provides all the latest available data on 232 Sustainable Development Goal indicators used to evaluate 17 goals.

This is the core of our mission, surpassing the Sustainable Development Goals. All of us, citizens of this world, are investing significant resources in the grand goal of making the world a better place: we are dedicating our lives to healthcare and education, developing new technologies, and investing heavily in infrastructure and next-generation education. What we haven't done enough is to investigate whether these efforts have really brought us closer to achieving our goals.

If the world wants to take progress seriously, we need to measure what is important more seriously.

Our data world is based on the work of others, and in turn, it should become the foundation of others

The research we publish here is not just the work of our small team. On the contrary, we rely on the work of a global community of scholars, and wherever possible, we believe our role is to provide the best available research and data in an understandable and accessible manner. Only when we discover that important questions have not been answered, will we conduct necessary research and fill the gaps ourselves.

Newton said, "If I see farther than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." This is how science should operate. Those who want to understand the world should be able to stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. Therefore, a key part of our mission is to establish an infrastructure that enables research and data to be publicly available and useful to everyone.

A publication that covers the long term and is built for the long term

To make progress in addressing the major issues facing our world, long-term focused work is required. Therefore, we are writing a publication aimed at maintaining assistance for decades: as new research improves our understanding of the world, we regularly update our existing work; We are establishing and expanding a central database that enables us to continuously update the entire publication with the best available data.

Establish infrastructure to make data and research easily accessible and understandable

The internet enables us to publish in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago: free distribution, and the ability to explore research and data through interactive documents. However, many studies today are published in a format that is essentially the same as the format provided by Gutenberg's printing press 500 years ago.

In order to make research and data as accessible as possible, we are a team of researchers collaborating with web developers. We are jointly building infrastructure to enable everyone in the world to understand how we are making progress in addressing the most pressing issues.

If you would like to join us as a developer or researcher, please refer to our job page.

Our data world is a public good

We have grand plans for the next few decades, but we have already had an impact. Every month, over one million readers come to our website. Our works are frequently reported by the media, and our publications provide many authors with their widely read works. Our works are widely shared through social media, and we are often cited by top journals including Science and Nature.

For many related search queries - "carbon dioxide emissions", "world poverty", "child mortality", "population growth" - we are one of the top ranked search results in many regions of the world. Our works are usually used as textbooks by schools and universities.

The purpose of our design work is to generate impacts beyond what our team can directly achieve. By creating charts and data that can be downloaded for free and embedded into the work of others, we support our colleagues in policy, media, and civil society, empowering them to address the issues we are concerned about.

That's why all the work we do is provided as a collective public good:

Visualization and text are licensed under CC BY, and you are free to use them for any purpose

Our data is available for download

All the code we write is open source under the MIT license and can be found on GitHub

Our funding comes from grants and reader donations

Reader donations are crucial to our work, providing us with the stability and independence we need, so we can focus on showcasing the data and evidence we believe everyone needs to know.

You can learn more about our funds on our 'How to Get Funds' page, and you can also help us do more by donating here - this will have a real impact.