Opening World Bank Data with QCRI’s GeoTagger
My colleagues and I at QCRI partnered with the World Bank several months ago to develop an automated GeoTagger platform to increase the transparency and accountability of international development projects by accelerating the process of opening key development and finance data. We are proud to launch the first version of the GeoTagger platform today. The project builds on the Bank’s Open Data Initiatives promoted by former President, Robert Zoellick, and continued under the current leadership of Dr. Jim Yong Kim.
The Bank has accumulated an extensive amount of socio-economic data as well as a massive amount of data on Bank-sponsored development projects worldwide. Much of this data, however, is not directly usable by the general public due to numerous data format, quality and access issues. The Bank therefore launched their “Mapping for Results” initiative to visualize the location of Bank-financed projects to better monitor development impact, improve aid effectiveness and coordination while enhancing transparency and social accountability. The geo-tagging of this data, however, has been especially time-consuming and tedious. Numerous interns were required to manually read through tens of thousands of dense World Bank project documentation, safeguard documents and results reports to identify and geocode exact project locations. But there are hundreds of thousands of such PDF documents. To make matters worse, these documents make seemingly “random” passing references to project locations, with no sign of any standardized reporting structure whatsoever.
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