[okfn-help] Open Factbook

Thu Jun 17 20:08:50 BST 2010

On 17 June 2010 18:50, William Waites <william.waites at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Peter Buneman told me a story today about some people who
> are making machine readable versions of the CIA World
> Factbook available online and selling them for £1500 or so.
>
> He and Heiko Müller have, for their own projects, done
> similar work and would like to make their machine readable
> versions available under an open license.

And I also did a version though not RDF (2 years ago now):

<http://knowledgeforge.net/econ/hg/file/9d3519cdeb3b/econdata/ciafactbook/data.py>

With a quick and dirty interface here:

<www.openeconomics.net/hwi/>

CSV can be found from <http://www.openeconomics.net/store/ciafactbook/>

(Called hwi = human welfare index because plan was to use factbook
series to construct human welfare indices (starting with standard HDI
= GDP + literacy + life expectancy))

> I'd suggest uploading the documents (considered as databases?)
> to archive.org, asserting an open license (ODBL? PDDL?) and
> then listing them in CKAN so they'll get indexed and such.

Yes this would be great.

> Jordan, thoughts about how to license this properly?

On licensing we can choose pretty much whatever we want since factbook
is public domain. I'd suggest using the PDDL for this though might
also try out the new ODC attribution license.

Rufus