In this module we explored some of the essential concepts that crop up again and again in discussions of data. What discussed what data is, and how we can get hold of it.

We posed ourselves a question: ‘How does healthcare spending influence life expectancy?’, and have found a dataset from the WorldBank that will help us to answer that question.

In the next module, we will import the data we just downloaded into a spreadsheet and start exploring it.

Further Reading

• The Open Data Handbook on File Formats
• Scraperwiki - we will cover this in a future course
• The Datahub - for searching and downloading datasets