Agent skills for working with Our World in Data. Teach your AI coding agent — Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and others — to search our charts, download the data behind them, and analyze it correctly.

Our World in Data publishes thousands of charts and datasets on global problems: poverty, health, energy, climate, education, and more. These skills give agents the knowledge to use that data well — the right APIs, the right query parameters, and the caveats that matter (country harmonization, citations, metadata).

Status: early and experimental. Interfaces may change. Feedback and issues are welcome!

Once installed, you can ask your agent things like:

• "Get life expectancy data for the US and UK since 1950 and plot the trend."
• "Find OWID charts about renewable energy adoption."
• "Download CO₂ emissions per country and compute per-capita values using OWID population data."
• "Make a scatter plot of child mortality against GDP per capita."

The skills trigger automatically when relevant — you don't need to invoke them by name.

Skills follow the open Agent Skills format (SKILL.md), so they work with any agent that supports the standard.

The HTTP-based skills are lightweight and language-agnostic. owid-catalog is the richer option when Python is available — it returns metadata-aware DataFrames and covers the full data catalog beyond published charts.

Install as a plugin from the marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add owid/skills
/plugin install owid@owid-skills

These are standard Agent Skills, read as-is by Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and many other tools — no Claude-specific setup required. The skills CLI detects which of your installed agents support skills (75+ supported) and copies them into each one's directory:

npx skills add owid/skills            # into the current project
npx skills add owid/skills --global   # user-level, across all your projects

Add --agent '*' to install to every supported agent, or --list to preview the skills first.

The skills are plain Agent Skills folders, so you can also copy or symlink them into whatever directory your agent reads. Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/owid/skills owid-skills

Then put owid-skills/skills/* where your agent looks for skills:

• Per project — ./.agents/skills/ (the shared convention read by Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, …)
• Per user — your agent's own skills directory, e.g. ~/.codex/skills/, ~/.gemini/skills/, or ~/.claude/skills/

The skills use a few common command-line tools: curl, jq, duckdb, and uv. Install them with your package manager (e.g. brew install jq duckdb uv), or on macOS run:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owid/skills/main/install-prerequisites-macos.sh | bash

Data published by Our World in Data is open: it is available under the Creative Commons BY license, and it builds on the work of the original data providers. The skills instruct agents to surface proper citations — please keep them when you publish results.

Want to add or improve a skill? See AGENTS.md for repo conventions (skill layout, registration, testing). In short:

• Each skill is a directory under skills/ with a SKILL.md (frontmatter name must match the directory name).
• Register new skills in .claude-plugin/marketplace.json.
• Test with claude plugin validate . and by loading the plugin directly: claude --debug --plugin-dir .
• Plugins are versionless on purpose: every commit to main is a release.

This repository is limited to skills that rely on public OWID endpoints and common CLI tools; skills that require OWID-internal infrastructure or credentials are out of scope.

Apache-2.0