AI skill for Our World in Data

An agent skill for working with Our World in Data. It teaches your AI assistant to find our charts and articles, pull the numbers behind them, put a chart into a page or a slide, and credit whoever produced the data. It works with the Claude and ChatGPT apps, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and others.

Our World in Data publishes thousands of charts and hundreds of articles on global problems: poverty, health, energy, climate, education, and more. This skill teaches assistants how to use that content properly: how to find the right chart, how to get the numbers behind it, what the data does and does not mean, and how to credit the people who collected it.

What you can do

Once installed, you can ask your agent things like:

• "Find the OWID chart on child mortality and give me the URL with the map open."
• "Get life expectancy data for the US and UK since 1950 and plot the trend."
• "Someone claims 5 million children under five die every year. Is that consistent with Our World in Data?"
• "Convert my CSV of forest area per country into forest area per person using OWID population."
• "What has Hannah Ritchie written on OWID recently?"
• "Embed the CO₂ per capita chart in this HTML page, or give me a PNG for the slides."
• "Where does the data in this chart come from and how was it processed?"

Most of the time you don't have to ask for it by name — your assistant reaches for it on its own when your question is about our charts or data.

What's in it

The skill is a short set of notes your assistant reads when it needs them: how to search our site, how to fetch the data and sources behind a chart, and how to put a chart into a page or a slide. You can read them in skills/owid/ if you're curious.

It runs no code of its own and needs no API key or account. Your assistant reads public pages and data files on ourworldindata.org, and nothing else.

Using the data

Our World in Data's own work is free to reuse under the Creative Commons BY licence. Most of the data, though, comes from other producers and keeps whatever licence they set, so check before you republish — and a few charts cannot be downloaded at all. The skill instructs agents to name the original producer, so please keep the citations when you publish results.

Every request the skill makes identifies itself as coming from this skill, which is how we can see it being used and keep supporting it. That is why links it gives you end in utm_source=owid-skills; the FAQ explains.

Installation

The quickest way is to ask your AI assistant:

Install the Our World in Data skill hosted at https://github.com/owid/skills/

Claude Code and Codex can do it themselves; in the Claude and ChatGPT apps, your assistant can walk you through the current menus.

What each app needs:

Your app	How
Claude app (paid plan)	In the plugin settings, add a marketplace from owid/skills, then install Our World in Data
ChatGPT app	In the plugin settings, add a marketplace from owid/skills, then install Our World in Data
Claude Code	/plugin marketplace add owid/skills, then /plugin install owid@owid-skills, then turn on auto-update for owid-skills under Marketplaces in /plugin
Codex	codex plugin marketplace add owid/skills, then codex plugin add owid@owid-skills
Anything else	npx skills add owid/skills, or copy the skills/owid/ folder into your agent's skills directory

None of them needs an Our World in Data account or a GitHub account. Start a new chat afterwards: plugins only apply to conversations that begin after installing.

Check it worked. In a new chat, ask:

Use the Our World in Data skill to fetch the data behind this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality — the complete time series for Uganda, and the source the chart relies on.

A working install returns the whole series for Uganda (about seventy yearly figures, starting in the 1950s) and names Gapminder and the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation as the source, not "Our World in Data". An assistant without the skill will say so; one that has it but didn't fetch anything will summarise or invent the numbers. If that happens, see the FAQ.

Updating. There are no version numbers: we change the skill in place. Update it where you installed it: reinstall it in the apps, run claude plugin update owid@owid-skills in Claude Code (or turn on auto-update for the owid-skills marketplace in /plugin), codex plugin marketplace upgrade owid-skills in Codex, or npx skills update for the skills CLI.

License

Creative Commons BY 4.0 — the same terms as the rest of Our World in Data's own work. Use it anywhere, change it, ship it inside your own project; just credit Our World in Data.