Statistics can be so difficult to make sense of — especially when trying to compare piles of numbers from many different sources. Last week this column showed the CIA Factbook, which is an excellent resource. It’s loaded with facts and figures on hundreds of countries, but how is it possible to understand what those numbers really mean in our world?
“The idea for NationMaster arose as I was surfing around the CIA World Factbook,” wrote Luke Metcalfe, manager/developer, NationMaster.com. “It’s a great read but I felt the individual figures didn’t mean much on their own. They’d be more illuminating if they were placed alongside other countries and shown relative to population. So I decided to put together a website that allowed users to generate graphs based on numerical data extracted from the Factbook. The next rather obvious realization was that there’s no reason I couldn’t take in data from other sources. Why shouldn’t the Net have a central location that allows you to compare countries on any statistic you like?”
Metcalfe created NationMaster.com to promote education and understanding about the world. The site makes it easy to engage with the indicators that shape global commerce, health, politics and ecology. When statistics are displayed in graphical form the facts they reflect become accessible and meaningful.
This is one of the coolest, most useful sites on the web. Information on countries may be graphically compared through groupings — Middle East or OPEC nations for example — or several individual nations may be selected and compared. There are also other useful sections at the site such as an encyclopedia, flags and maps of the world. NationMaster.com is an excellent ready-reference resource for anyone who wants to know more about our global village.
