Open Data — Mongolia
Where to find data on Mongolia
Data is everything in today’s economy. Without it, businesses, governments, and even consumers can make effective decisions. Daily in my work as a university instructor and data scientist, I look for data that can explain, illustrate, and answer questions and issues about Mongolia and the world.
Data is the new oil. — Bryan Krzanich, Intel CEO
In Mongolia data (and the information that comes from it) are sometimes in short supply. So I wanted to put together a list of open data sources about Mongolia that can be used for analysis, research, business, etc. I will keep it updated as I find new sources.
These are data sources that contain many different categories of data.
Mongolian National Statistical Office: A large amount of data on key macroeconomic and social data. This should be your first stop for national or regional data. Link: 1212.mn
OpenAQ: Air quality in Mongolia’s capital isn’t great, and OpenAQ aggregates air quality measurements for over 40 locations in Mongolia. Data goes back to 2015 for most sensors in UB and back to 2017 for those outside UB. Link: openaq.org
CrimeMap: Mongolia’s national police agency runs a database of reported crimes that are able to be mapped. The service doesn’t work very often, but when it does it is pretty interesting to look at. Also, I made a dashboard last year that uses data scraped from the crime map that you can find here. Link: crimemap.police.gov.mn
M-Lab: Measurement Lab (M-Lab) has a mission to monitor and report on network (internet) performance around the world. Their open dataset (accessible through Google BigQuery) includes Mongolia and is freely accessible. Ever wanted to know how Mongolian internet compares to other countries? Which ISP is better? M-Lab can answer that. Warning, this dataset requires some network and big data knowledge (or at least SQL database knowledge). Link: measurementlab.net
Mongolian Stock Exchange: The Mongolian Stock Exchange (MSE) recently added semi-annual financial reports for over 100 list companies in English. However what is lacking are the official definitions of these terms according to Mongolian accounting standards (which are different from GAAP or IFRS). Link: mse.mn
Mongolia GIS Data: One extremely useful set of data is from Christopher Free, a quantitative ecologist at Rutgers University. He has collected GIS (geographic information systems) data for borders, roads, and zones for Ulaanbaatar and the aimags. This is useful if you want to model data over a geographic space, like market penetration, crime, etc. I hope to add to this dataset soon with a Khoroo and District shapefiles for Ulaanbaatar. Link: marine.rutgers.edu
Government Ministries: Each government ministry often has a statistics or data section on their website (often available only in Mongolian). Often the data is in the format of a PDF in a blog post, and isn’t very easy to access. The general government website zasag.mn has a list of government ministries and agencies along with their websites. Link: zasag.mn
The Need for a Data Market
Above are the datasets that I am aware of. I’m sure there are more, and this highlights the need for a central data market for open data (or paid data). As Mongolia develops the need for high quality data, the demand for open data will skyrocket. I’ve considered doing this myself for some time, but the amount of work seems prohibitive for me alone.
Happy data hunting!
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