Purpose:
The chatbot has been designed to guide you to the correct page amongst the millions of pages of pre-aggregated trade statistics. It lets you search on data along with metadata, it can guide you step by step to identify the correct page and it can help you search information among the key documents in the WITS website. The data search is only for pages under the TradeStats section and does not extend to search of analytical databases, HS-6 digit trade and tariff data pages. It selectively searches the help section of WITS.
Note: If too many questions are asked, you will be asked to type in a captcha to validate questions are not being asked by a robot. If for some reason the chatbot is not working, you can browse and search for earlier answered question in the recently asked questions. The questions are answered using a natural language processing engine in the back and we will be periodically reviewing the answers provided and retraining the application to further improve the answers. If you find any glaring discrepancy in the answers, please send us the details preferably with a screenshot to wits@worldbank.org.
How to Search with Chatbot:
Launch chatbot, by clicking on the Alpha bot icon. There are three options on top of the chatbot window and they are (i) “Data Search with or without metadata” (ii) Narrow Search (iii) Knowledge Search
Data Search with metadata is by default and you can ask simple questions like “what is the exports of a country”, or more complex questions like “what is the imports of a particular product of a country from another from a particular year to a particular year”. When asking year specific questions please check TradeStats Data Availability section for year coverage by country. You will get metadata for all valid country and indicator names followed by link to the data page. You can turn of metadata search if you do not want it.
To ensure your search results in a valid result, please ensure the search term has at least one of the following “country name”, or “product name”, or “indicator name”.
The list of names are available in countries metadata, products metadata and indicators metadata page. For countries we also have tried to have variations like “Germany”, “German” or “China”, “Chinese”. For products, though the data is available at sector level we try to match the product name to a sector and provide the data for that sector. If a product name appears in more than one sector, then we provide information for all the sectors along with a link to show the product name under that sector. For example, Aluminum is in sector Metals, Chemicals, Minerals and Machine and Electrical, in this case we provide a lin k to a page where you can find out all the HS 6 digit description that has the word Aluminum in it along with the sector to which it belongs.
The second option is “Narrow Search” which triggers a wizard and you can select “Country”, “Product” or “Indicator” and start typing the relevant name. There is a type ahead feature so if you select Country and after you type the first three characters it will give suggestion. For example, when you have selected country and type Ind you will get option of India and Indonesia. After each parameter selection you will get a query result relevant to the selection and you can browse those pages or add additional parameters.
The third option is knowledge search which helps you search terms in pages like Glossary, FAQ, Did you Know, NTM Measures (Feb 2014 Version), Trade Metadata, and select pages from WITS help, You can select knowledge search and ask questions like “What is Simple Average Tariff” or to get definition use keyword about or define, for example about RCA or define RCA.
To explore what questions other uses have been asking you can check the Recently asked questions
For questions on how to use WITS or on methodology, if you have issues accessing the data or if you want to provide us feedback, you can continue to reach us at wits@worldbank.org or ask a question on the WITS User Forum.