2012. What challenges?

What challenges will bring us 2012 ?

Mobile – social – open data and metadata –  making data findable and attractive (visualisation!)!

mobile

‘Web technologies have become powerful enough that they are used to build full-featured applications; this has been true for many years in the desktop and laptop computer realm, but is increasingly so on mobile devices as well. A W3C document summarizes the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the power of Web applications, and how they apply more specifically to themobile context.’

See also this blog post about mobile: https://blogstats.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/mobile-is-not-the-future-its-now/

social

There a lots of opinions and predictions about the role of social media. Here’s one in 11 points:

Many statistical agencies use social media, mostly as an additional information channel.

I.e. UK http://www.facebook.com/statisticsONS and nearly all are on twitter

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open data and metadata

The open (government) data movement gained further momentum in 2011 and will do so in 2012, too.

See also:

• Berners Lee speaking https://blogstats.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/linked-data-its-not-a-top-down-system-berners-lee-and-opengov/
• open data and official statistics: A presentation http://www.box.com/s/y0b619ro3b3m0oppx61x
• and a blog post  https://blogstats.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/open-data-some-perspectives/

findable and attractive

Finding the appropriate data in three clicks and understanding these data is a eternal challenge – not only for officuial statistics’ websites.

A lot has been done. See the new websites of Italy (ISTAT) and others (please update the information about new websites and put the links in a comment, thanks). More to come 2012 as Germany (destatis), Australia and Denmark and others (please … ) plan to bring their new websites.

Visualisation is a major topic in this context. Statistical offices present their interactive and visual content in overviews (i.e. destatis or FSO of Switzerland) and use more and more third party applications like NComVa (Italy, Eurostat) or Google public data (Catalunya).

Some thoughts on visualisation ..

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And there’s an issue whose importance is often underestimated. Not to forget:

statistical literacy!

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Finally, I wish you all the best for 2012!

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