The xMart platform is a data harmonization and warehousing solution used by the World Health Organization (WHO) for health data. This tool contains a collection of features to help WHO data managers standardize, integrate and and store in a format that is ready for analysis.

xMart is a component of the World Health Data Hub (WHDH) and a publicly accessible information page about xMart and it role in the WHDH is available.

The tool is inspired by the need to combine and analyze files of various formats (over which you have no control), such as this one:

Working with a file such as this can be very difficult, especially if your main job at the moment is to produce analytic outputs. Instead of doing analysis, you end up cleaning data.

xMart encourages a “datamart model”: prepare your team’s data once in a centralized repository rather than in an ad-hoc manner.

xMart is organized as a collection of virtual “data marts” which physically reside in a single SQL Server database. Data marts can then be managed in a self-service manner by data mangers, including the ability to independently create tables, pipelines (connections to data sources), manage security, etc.