Reboot

Reboot

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  • Olle Jonsson
    Olle Jonsson
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    Public[er] data research (an amateur professes love for public data)
    After experiencing the near-mythical Pecha Kucha session (aka Guy's 20x20 talks), I was stoked about almost every subject that had been touched.

    Somehow they were all connected: the impact of the talks melded and made a lasting impression -- we were just overwhelmed with ideas.

    Peter Rukavina's lightning drive through the landscape of the "data that we, the public, paid for" made me start thinking of Danish public data. I'm a Swedish person, living and working in Denmark. I began sniffing at public statistics.

    http://www.dst.dk is the Danish statistics bureau (freely translated). I noted that there was an RSS feed publishing the titles of statistics tables that had had a recent change. Like a post with a title of "Farms and area with selected crops by region (County), area with the crop and unit" with the body: "AFG2". The title is linked to the table's website at http://www.statbank.dk/

    Pretty cool and abstract use of RSS - machine-friendly. "Releases" is the simple title: http://rss.dst.dk/statbankupdates

    When you search the data table, you come to a result page, where you have 13 (!) export formats to choose from.

    I'll look into what kinds of use I can put this data to. Most of it seems to be mostly for journalists & social scientists, but there just has to be some use-value to the people in there. It's raw numbers.

    Anyway, how is the public data in your country? Any hurdles to using it? Is it hard to get to? What data would you like?
    • 16 Jun 2006, 2:57 pm
  • Ton Zijlstra
    Ton Zijlstra
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    Re: Public[er] data research (an amateur professes love for public data)
    Hey Olle!

    Most of the publicly available statistics in NL is available through http://www.cbs.nl/

    It has a newsfeed in Dutch as well as English (http://www.cbs.nl/cmssiteengine/presentation/functional/page...)
    but that contains news clippings not updates on statistics.

    Most of the data is freely available on-line at http://statline.cbs.nl/

    You can also get paid subscriptions to their most recent and more detailed stuff (e.g. on specific areas of your region or city). The aggregated stuff is online.

    Ton
    • 21 Jun 2006, 2:51 pm