For more than six decades, the CIA World Factbook was one of the most widely used public references on Earth. First compiled in 1962 and released in unclassified form in 1971, it became freely available to the public in 1975 and moved onto the web in the 1990s — a standardised, open profile of every nation, updated year after year.
In 2025, the CIA bid the World Factbook a fond farewell. Read their farewell →
We've carried that work forward. We've mapped every CIA World Factbook datapoint back to its original sources and added it to the National Capability Atlas — open, traceable, and kept current, so every figure shows where it came from.
The mapped Factbook data now sits alongside the Global Institute for National Capability's National Capability Atlas and its five open indices — the National Capability Index, National Research Index, Bilateral Engagement Index, Sovereign Speech Index and National Development Index — making Factbase one of the world's most comprehensive open sources on national data.
Every dataset has an open-source core, available under CC BY 4.0 for academic and commercial use. Query it from your AI assistant, explore it in the Studio, or download it in bulk.