Use cases

Global Health Observatory

WHO’s GHO (Global Health Observatory) dataset (http://apps.who.int/ghodata/) is published in accordance to the WHO report ”Global burden of disease: 2004 update”. The aim of GHO is to provide access to data and analyses for monitoring the global health situation. Specifically, it contains statistical information regarding the mortality and burden of disease classified according to the death and DALY (disability-adjusted life year) estimates grouped by countries The burden of disease is thus an indirect measurement of the amount of suffering caused by a given condition to a well-established population in a specific period of time. However, the measures of death and DALY estimates are only available in the spreadsheet format thus hindering the linking and integration with other information and data sources. Therefore, our approach was to convert the data into RDF. However, the data is described in several dimensions and thus a simple row-based transformation was not possible. Therefore, we used the csvimport plugin, which uses the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary, for the conversion as it is designed particularly to represent multidimensional statistical data as RDF. The dataset is available at http://gho.aksw.org