MSO's underlying data — the same data powering the interactive observatory — is published as an open, harmonised dataset, organised around the four FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable.
Every indicator has a stable, human-readable identifier (its indicator_slug),
described with rich metadata — title, unit, coverage, citation — in the searchable catalog below and in dataset.jsonld (schema.org Dataset).
Data and metadata are retrievable over plain HTTP, with no authentication, registration, or paywall: as files below, live per indicator (embedded chart + CSV export) in the indicator explorer, or via the interactive observatory.
Data uses a single, documented long-format schema (indicator / country / year / value) shared across all 151 indicators, in plain CSV — readable by any statistical or programming environment without a custom parser. See the schema below.
Every indicator carries a full source citation, its original licence, and provenance back to the primary data provider, plus MSO's own CC-BY 4.0 licence on the compilation itself. See provenance and licence.
Browse or search 121 indicators (a curated subset of the 151 in the full catalog below) to see a live chart and download its data directly from Our World in Data's own API.
Two files, joined by indicator_slug: the data itself (151 indicators, ~1.9 million
country-year data points, long format), and a catalog giving each indicator's description, unit,
coverage, and full source citation and licence.
Download data (CSV, zip, ~13 MB) → Download indicator catalog (CSV) →
Machine-readable dataset description: dataset.jsonld (schema.org Dataset).
Two files, joined by indicator_slug:
mso_data.csv.zip — long format, one row per indicator/country/year:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
indicator_slug | Stable, human-readable identifier for the indicator. |
indicator_id | Numeric identifier of the underlying variable (Our World in Data grapher ID). |
country | Country or region name. |
year | Year of the observation. |
value | Value of the indicator for that country-year. |
mso_indicators_catalog.csv — one row per indicator:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
indicator_slug, indicator_id | Join keys matching the data file. |
name, title_public | Full and public-facing indicator names. |
description | Definition of what the indicator measures. |
unit | Unit of measurement. |
num_countries, first_year, last_year, num_data_points | Coverage of the series actually available. |
citation | Full source citation, as required for reuse and attribution. |
license | Licence of the original source dataset (may differ from MSO's own CC-BY 4.0 layer). |
source_url | Link to the original data provider. |
Every indicator is sourced from public international databases (UN agencies, World Bank, WHO,
SIPRI, World Happiness Report, and others), most via Our World in Data's processing pipeline. The exact source, publisher, and
original licence for each indicator is given in its citation and license
fields in the catalog — please cite this when reusing the data. Aggregate acknowledgments are also
listed on the homepage.
MSO's own compilation, harmonisation and catalog are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
(CC-BY 4.0) licence: reuse is free, provided the original source is credited. The underlying data
for each indicator remains subject to its original source's licence (documented per-indicator in the
license field of mso_indicators_catalog.csv — e.g. CC BY, or a data
provider's own terms of use); check it before redistribution. This does not cover the MSO website's
own code, design, and text, which remain © Vincent Picouet.
This is a first, minimal implementation. Planned next steps include: per-indicator persistent identifiers (DOIs via Zenodo) and a machine-readable interoperability schema (DCAT) beyond the CSV files above.