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Google announced a partnership with the World Bank today to make Google Map Maker data more accessible to government organizations in disaster scenarios. Google Map Maker is the tool for crowd-sourcing the editing and maintenance of Google's world map. Its user-generated data include locations of hospitals, schools, settlements, water sources and minor roads.

Access to these data will help governments, NGOs, researchers and individuals plan without waiting for the changes to be approved and added to the official maps. World Bank partner organizations, such as government and U.N. agencies, can contact World Bank offices to request access to the data. Kenya, South Sudan, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Moldova, Mozambique, Nepal and Haiti will pilot the project.

The World Bank has announced the launch of a Web-based urban development platform for July 1.

In conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Institute for Urban Research, the Urbanization Knowledge Platform will link policy makers, academics, the Bank and other groups struggling to address the rapid increase in the size and importance of cities around the world.

The World Bank works with a network of specialists all over the world to gather and curate a large body of economic development data each year. The organization has made a few million dollars from subscription sales of its datasets to universities and other institutional subscribers - but last year the Bank decided it would rather give the data away for free and see what would happen.

In order to make the most of this new opportunity, the Bank decided to work with Challenge Post, a software developer contest adminstration service, to create a contest called Apps for Development, challenging developers around the world to build apps on top of the data. The apps are in, it's time to vote and the things people have built are quite remarkable. The apps have come from 30 different countries and more were built in Africa than in Europe.

As part of its 2010 Annual Meeting, to be held October 7 and 8, the World Bank is making several announcements that point to the organization's support in open data and what it calls an "open development agenda." The World Bank is increasing the number of datasets it makes available. And it is also announcing its first worldwide app-building challenge Apps for Development.

The challenge is designed to crowdsource solutions for the World Bank's 8 Millennium Development Goals - goals like eradicating poverty and hunger and achieving universal primary education. The challenge is calling for apps to be built using the World Bank Data Catalog, in a move that hopes that by opening access to this data, that developers, researchers, and local governments and organizations will be able to better tackle social, economic, and environmental problems.

Google just announced that it now uses public data from the World Bank to display graphs for queries like "children per woman in brazil" or "internet users in the united states." To do so, Google makes uses of the World Bank's public API. Through this, Google can access 17 World Development Indicators. Google displays this data in interactive graphs that make it easy to compare stats for different countries. The timing of this announcement was likely planned to coincide with the news about Wolfram Alpha's integration with Microsoft's Bing.