What's this? (AKA the FAQ)
Why set up this project?
Crucial World indicator data like that provided by the UN deserves to be available in as many forms as possible so that it can be reused and combined with other indicators so we can better understand and visualize what’s happening in the World. Although UNDATA has content available in XML unfortunately it currently doesn’t have an API and the data sets can be hard to extract and re-use – hence the genesis of this project to fill the gap.
Who owns the data?
The data is the property of the various United Nations organisations which curate it and make it available at http://data.un.org. The data us provided by the UN on a fully public license which encourages distribution and re-use – if you want to do anything with the data please refer to this original UN Terms and Conditions.
Is the Service Free to use
Yes, the service is completely free to use, just as the original data is. If bandwidth or hosting charges become prohibitive we might explore various ways to finance these costs through sponsorship, advertising etc. – but always in a 100% non-profit manner and via consultation with the community.
Who’s behind the project?
The project was set up and is supported by 3scale networks but over time, if it proves useful, we’d like to open up management the site and the service code base so its main users can control the destiny of the service.
Is the code for the Service Open Source
Not yet, but we expect to release the service code under an open source license shortly, there are also tutorials forthcoming on how Java AppEngine was used to create the service.
