Tufte’s Granddad

Are you in need for holiday presents in the office and on a tight budget? Why not go back in time and shop for books out of copyright. The Internet Archive is here to help. Check out Willard Cope Brinton: Graphic presentation (1939), and delve into an ancestor to the Tufte books.

You can read this [...]

World Bank public data, now in Google search

From The Official Google Blog:

11/11/2009 11:00:00 AM

When we first launched public data on Google.com, we wanted to make statistics easier to find and to encourage debate based on facts rather than intuition. The day after we launched, a friend who worked at the World Bank called me, her voice filled with enthusiasm, “Did you know [...]

SDMX and RDF: Getting Acquainted

SDMX
SDMX (Statistical data and metadata exchange) is a widely accepted standard for communicating data  in the realm of official statistics.
‘SDMX is an initiative to foster standards for the exchange of statistical information. Sponsored by BIS – ECB – EUROSTAT – IMF – OECD – UN – World Bank.’
More and more applications accept and [...]

Google’s Interest in Statistics

Google’s interest in statistics is steadily growing. And this not least because Ola Rosling now works with Google and pushes visualization tools like motion chart and the public-data project.
In his presentation at the Gov 2.0 in Washington (September 2009) Ola Rosling presents theese tools: Ola Rosling, “Seeing Data as Change Over Time”

Accessing [...]

About necessary and unnecessary things

In a interview given at a technology symposium at the Embassy of Finland in Washington (15 October 2009), ‘Berners-Lee speaks about the importance for governments to place great amounts of data on the Web and the emergence of the semantic Web. He cites successful examples in Britain.’

And he repeats what he already said in one [...]

Hal Varian (Google) and Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.), “Measurables”

Gov 2.0 Summit Videos (from Google Public Sector Blog)
Monday, September 14, 2009 | 11:45 AM
If you weren’t able to make the Gov 2.0 Summit last week in DC, you’re in luck – videos of most presentations are now online.
We’ll post an update when Ola Rosling’s presentation on public data search and visualization is online.
Tim O’Reilly [...]

Why open standards matter

On this blog we usually showcase best practices of how to communicate statistics and keep the technological aspects of it in the background – which is the right way to do. But we also never get tired of mentioning how statistics is a basis for informed decision making and therefore a foundation for democracy. To [...]

Open Data Initiative – Free SuperVIEW hosting of data

From Space-Time Research blog:

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2009

Open Data Initiative – Free SuperVIEW hosting of data

Space-Time Research this week launched a new program called the Open Data Initiative at the International Statistical Institute (ISI) 2009 conference in Durban.

What is the Open Data Initiative?

The Open Data Initiative is a Web 2.0 site for disseminating public data. [...]

To build an ecosystem of data on the Web

Using statistical data to explain the world, telling stories with statistical data, visualizing statistical data to make these data accessible in a quick and instructive manner – all these topics are well known and belong to  long and intensive discussions and activities in many institutions of official statistics. Results can be seen on the websites [...]

A New View of Data.Gov

A New View of Data.Gov (from Google Public Policy Blog)
Friday, July 10, 2009 | 3:09 PM
On May 21, the Obama administration launched Data.gov, a web site that provides access to raw data from federal government agencies. Access to this raw data is useful, but to unleash the power of the data, you need tools for [...]

Helping free up government data

Some weeks ago Tim Berners Lee’s message at TED was:  Raw Data Now! .
Now Gordon Brown charged him with helping free up government data for all to use.
In a telephone interview with Rory Cellan-Jones,BBC technology correspondent ‘he was adamant that this was not some party political job, but part of a grand global missio’. [...]