UNdata and GeoJoin

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.

#maker_map_19793 {width: 100%; height: 400px;}

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Maker.maker_host=’http://maker.geocommons.com’;Maker.finder_host=’http://finder.geocommons.com’;Maker.core_host=’http://core.geocommons.com’;
Maker.load_map(“maker_map_19793″, “19793″);