Signaling the most aggressive open data push in the international development community to date, World Bank President Robert Zoellick launched Data.WorldBank.org this morning ahead of the organization’s spring meeting. All of the World Bank’s 2,000+ data indicators are now open and freely available to the public. This new website is the browser for some of the most commonly used data, built to let researchers and policy makers filter though the vast data sets and quickly jump to indicators. The site currently includes 339 indicators from 209 countries, and this is just the start.

Over the next several weeks we will work with the World Bank’s team to add an additional 700+ indicators to the site. There is also a serious second phase road map that focuses on improving access to the the API and building capacity among a community of developers to better use the data.

We built the data browser using all open source tools. The site is powered by Drupal, the graphs use the Flot Javascript library for jQuery, and the map tiles are powered by MapBox, baked using TileMill, and served with OpenLayers. Here are some more details from the key sections of the site.

You can quickly sort indicators and map them:

Every country has a dashboard page:

All indicators are organized into topics:

For much of this data, this is the first time that it is available in languages other than English. The site is currently in Arabic, Spanish, French, and English.

This site shows what can be done with off the shelf Drupal modules like Features, Context, and Views 3, and open source visualization tools like OpenLayers and Flot (there’s no Flash anywhere). It’s running Pressflow for performance, and is deployed on a high availability cloud hosting infrastructure. We will post more technical notes about how Data.WorldBank.org was built in a few days. If you are at DrupalCon, stop by our table for a demo of how we built the site.