He who holds the data

Just this morning, my colleague Justin passed me this link to a talk by Hans Rosling at TED. I was very impressed by Hans' presentation on multiple levels:

As a worker for a humanitarian organisation:
* data showing the shift in the poverty margin of countries around the world.

As a software professional:
* Data Representation and Presentation
* and the sourcing of the data and Hans' ideas on opening up data on publicly funded research projects to be searchable by the public.

And as a member of the wider audience:
* How Hans did his presentation.

I was very encouraged by the data around the shift of where poverty laid in the world. It showed that the general trend was that poverty was somewhat on the decline, at least under the variables Hans provided (Life expectancy and wealth).

Hans presented a very humorous and entertaining, whilst informative and very pointed talk. His focus being on how preconceived ideas effects how we view situations and how data presented properly can debunk these ideas and educate people on the real state of affairs.

The software Hans used in his talk was very eye opening. It was cool to display trends by selecting items and tracking them over time using animations, as well as the ability to drill down further into the data.

But the real crunch was at the end when Hans started talking about how the "curators" of publicly funded research were refusing to make it possible for the general public to search. I honestly believe that research done with public funding, should be made available to the public. Now I can understand that the databases containing this data can often contain information that needs explanation as to what it actually means, but this should really be documented.

When I finished watching this video, I was left with an overwhelming feeling of WOW and what do I do with this information now.

I think this needs more pondering.