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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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With almost 5,000 different statistics about the countries, the NationMaster.com is by and large one of the leading statistical sources on the Net. Taking numbers out of such official and reputable sources as CIA World Factbook, United Nations, World Health Organization, World Bank, World Resources Institute, UNESCO, UNICEF and OECD, it provides the readers with one of the most valued sources of comparable information. As the creator of the site Luke Metcalfe acknowledges, his intention was to make the official statistical information more illuminating for the general public by placing it alongside other countries and showing it in relation to the population.

The site was officially launched in 2003 and ever since has been used as useful tool for private and academic researches in many fields. This website was created by Rapid Intelligence, a web techology company based in Sydney, Australia. Another product of this company is the search engine Factbites, a source that claims to focus upon the computational linguistics, data mining, data warehousing and artificial intelligence and pretends to be an alternative to Google for encyclopedia-style searches.

There are of course many drawbacks. As the authors of the site admit, very few studies include all countries in the world. The major problem is that not all the data is available for any country, but this doesn't mean the remaining data becomes less important and less relevant. There is also a serious problem with some of the data that represented some older and out-of-date snapshots. Some historians may found useful to know what was the percentage of the English and French speaking populations in Canada or in any other country in 1995 or earlier, but regarding some persons' plans to move to foreign countries perhaps much more useful would be to have as recent data as possible, or some estimations if such exact information isn't available.

The authors admit that only the states have privilege to be included in these lists of statistics. No sub-national units, no matter how important they may seem in the eyes of their beholders and for the people of the world, can be listed and thus put into comparative perspective. On the other hand, many tiny nations that can be found on the maps only with magnifying glasses are listed and thus can be measured against their giant neighbors. Some of the data is free to see and download, other is restricted to users that pay some fees. Fees vary largely depending on the months of subscription and the character of users, educational, commercial and others.

What I find most intriguing is this site is how so many graphs can speak better than any political propaganda no matter how eloquent is it source. No matter what is the self-perception of some nations, when put in comparative perspective, we can see their true place in the world. Another drawback of the site is that usually the snapshots are what they are, momentary pictures that can hardly reflect well the current trends. Countries that look close enough in the graphs may just follow opposite directions and look very different just 10-20 years from now. No matter how important these methodological problems are the NationMaster.com offers important tools for comparative nations' research, for the businesses, for the individuals and for the students alike.