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glossarywho

The goal of glossarywho is to provide data from the WHO Glossary in a tidy format. Access definitions by themes here or use the search bar at the top of the page.

Installation

You can install the development version of glossarywho from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("openwashdata/glossarywho")
## Run the following code in console if you don't have the packages
## install.packages(c("dplyr", "knitr", "readr", "stringr", "gt", "kableExtra"))
library(dplyr)
library(knitr)
library(readr)
library(stringr)
library(gt)
library(kableExtra)

Alternatively, you can download the individual datasets as a CSV or XLSX file from the table below.

  1. Click Download CSV. A window opens that displays the CSV in your browser.
  2. Right-click anywhere inside the window and select “Save Page As…”.
  3. Save the file in a folder of your choice.
dataset CSV XLSX
definitions Download CSV Download XLSX
themes Download CSV Download XLSX

Data

The package provides access to glossary terms, definitions and thematic areas from the WHO Glossary. The datasets are: themes and definitions.

definitions

The dataset definitions contains data about definitions from the WHO glossary It has 207 observations and 2 variables

definitions |> 
  head(3) |> 
  gt::gt() |>
  gt::as_raw_html()
Term Description
Accountability Answerability or legal responsibility for identifying and removing obstacles and barriers to health services. This should include responding to findings from monitoring and evaluation (1).
Accuracy The degree to which a measurement, test or procedure correctly reflect the true value or condition (2).
Delineated geographical areas within a particular territory created for the purpose of administration. For example: county, district, province, state, region, subnational or national (3).

themes

The dataset themes contains data about thematic areas from the WHO glossary. It has 217 observations and 2 variables

themes |> 
  head(3) |> 
  gt::gt() |>
  gt::as_raw_html()
Thematic Area Term
Data source,collection, and collation Data accessibility
Data source,collection, and collation Data type
Data source,collection, and collation Primary data

For an overview of the variable names, see the following table.

variable_name variable_type description
Term character Term in the Glossary
Description character Description of the term

Example 

library(glossarywho)
library(ggplot2)
library(tidyverse)
# Plot a bar chart of count of definitions by thematic areas 
themes |> 
  count(`Thematic Area`) |> 
  ggplot2::ggplot(aes(x = fct_reorder(`Thematic Area`, n), y = n)) +
  geom_col(fill = "skyblue") +
  coord_flip() +
  labs(title = "Count of definitions by thematic areas",
       x = "Count",
       y = "Thematic area") +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(axis.text.y = element_text(size = 8)) +
  theme(panel.grid.major.y = element_blank(),
         panel.grid.minor.y = element_blank())

# Wordcloud of most common words from definitions
library(wordcloud)
library(tm)

# Create a corpus
corpus <- Corpus(VectorSource(definitions$Description))

# Clean the corpus
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, content_transformer(tolower))
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removePunctuation)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeNumbers)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeWords, stopwords("en"))
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, stripWhitespace)

# Create a document term matrix
dtm <- DocumentTermMatrix(corpus)

# Create a wordcloud
wordcloud(words = names(sort(colSums(as.matrix(dtm)), decreasing = TRUE)),
          freq = colSums(as.matrix(dtm)),
          min.freq = 1,
          max.words = 100,
          random.order = FALSE,
          colors = brewer.pal(8, "Dark2"))

License

Data are available as CC-BY.

Citation

Please cite this package using:

citation("glossarywho")
#> To cite package 'glossarywho' in publications use:
#> 
#>   Dubey Y (2025). "glossarywho: WHO Glossary."
#>   doi:10.5281/zenodo.14754017
#>   <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14754017>,
#>   <https://github.com/openwashdata/glossarywho>.
#> 
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#> 
#>   @Misc{dubey:2025,
#>     title = {glossarywho: WHO Glossary},
#>     author = {Yash Dubey},
#>     year = {2025},
#>     doi = {10.5281/zenodo.14754017},
#>     url = {https://github.com/openwashdata/glossarywho},
#>     abstract = {This package provides access to a tidy version of the WHO Glossary (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240105485) and thematic areas for each term.},
#>     version = {0.1.0},
#>   }