All about Dissemination of (Official) Statistics
is held in Vilnius, Lithuania from 6 to 10 September 2010. The conference is being organised by Statistics Lithuania. The organising committee may be contacted by email at imaodbc@stat.gov.lt. Only for participants. Login and password needed.
As usual a lot of interesting presentations. Who will get the Bo Sundgren award for the best one?
A focus on designing technologies that allow the “visualization of things not visible” has been at the center of Ben Shneiderman’s work over the past two decades. He advocates the discovery of temporal patterns, relationships and clusters via an empowering user experience which enables discovery at a customizable pace and depth.
Shneiderman makes a clear distinction between high-resolution presentation (ala Edward Tufte) anddiscovery, which he defines as “the dynamics of interaction.” Noting that different patterns will be interesting to different people, he suggests that the capacity to quickly test out a viewpoint, to ask a large number of questions in a short amount of time…is an “enriching gift.”
Social networks and statehood – The future is another country: Despite its giant population, Facebook is not quite a sovereign state—but it is beginning to look and act like one.
Jul 22nd 2010 | BERLIN AND SAN FRANCISCO | From The Economist print edition http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=16646000&subjectID=348909&fsrc=nwl
Last year Google started crawling structured data on websites (microformats, RDFa) and using them in search results by displaying rich snippets (see here) .
Now Google gets even more semantic by buying last week Metaweb with the semantic database Freebase.
Official Google Blog: ‘Over time we’ve improved search by deepening our understanding of queries and web pages. The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly. Today, we’ve acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world. Working together we want to improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone.’ … ‘In addition to our ideas for search, we’re also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, we plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone.’
What is Metweb?
There’s already some information about Official Statistics in Freebase 😉 !
Some of their findings:
‘The majority of sites that publish official statistics do not incorporate any graphical representation into their websites.’
‘.. while HTML was the most popular format, PDFs were more prevalent than spreadsheets. We take this as evidence that many institutions have operations and attitudes that are still very much centred on the presentation of data on the printed page. ‘
‘It is interesting to note that PC-Axis is only used in the world of official statistics outside the United States: 10% of the NSO websites offer data in that format but not one U.S. agency does. … PC-Axis would seem to be an effective way for statistical agencies from different countries to pool their resources.’
‘Again, it seems clear that institutions tend to present a defined set of information rather than allowing users to define their own.’
‘From this, admittedly cursory examination of the dissemination practices of providers of international statistics, it seems that the main approach still undertaken by the majority of statistical disseminators is to electronically replicate the print world of old. Many are taking baby steps, or in some cases giant leaps, toward the brave new world of Web 2.0 but they are still solidly in the minority.’
The complete article in The Statistics Newsletter.
Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we’re sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We’re also launching the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs.
Popular public data topics on Google
We know people want to be able to find reliable data and statistics on a variety of subjects. But what kind of statistics are they looking for most? To help us better prioritize which data sets to include in our public data search feature, we’ve analyzed anonymous search logs to find patterns in the kinds of searches people are doing, similar to the patterns you can find onGoogle Trends and Insights for Search. Some public data providers have asked us to share what we’ve learned, so we decided to put together an approximate list of the 80 most popular data and statistics search topics.
You can read the complete list at this link (PDF), but here’s the top 20 to get you started:
| 1. School comparisons 2. Unemployment 3. Population 4. Sales tax 5. Salaries 6. Exchange rates 7. Crime statistics 8. Health statistics (health conditions) 9. Disaster statistics 10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) |
11. Last names 12. Poverty 13. Oil price 14. Minimum wage 15. Consumer price index, inflation 16. Mortality 17. Cost of living 18. Election results 19. First names 20. Accidents, traffic violations |
You’ll notice some interesting entries in the list. For example, we were surprised by how many people search for data about popular first and last names. Perhaps people are trying to decide what to name a new baby boy or girl? As it turns out, people are interested in a wide range of statistical information.
To build the list, we looked at the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search, using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools — similar to what we do for our annual Zeitgeist. We combined search terms into groups, filtering out spam and repeats, to prepare a list reflecting the most popular public data topics. As a statistician, it’s important for me to note that the data only covers one week’s worth of searches in the U.S., so there could be seasonal and other confounding factors (perhaps there was an election that week). In addition, preparing a study like this requires a fair amount of manual grouping of similar queries into topics, which is fairly subjective and prone to human error. While imperfect, we still think the list is helpful to consider.
The Public Data Explorer
As you can see, people are interested in a wide variety of data and statistics, but this information is only useful if it’s easy to access, understand and communicate. That’s why today we’re also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs, a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog. We’ve embedded the following chart using the new feature as an example:
This chart compares life expectancy and the number of births per woman over the last 47 years for most economies of the world. The bubble sizes show population, and colors represent different geographic regions. Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time. Click “explore data” to dig deeper.
Animated charts can bring data to life. Click the play button in the chart to watch life expectancy increase while fertility rates fall around the world. The bubble colors make it quick and easy to see clusters of countries along these variables (e.g., in 1960 the European and Central Asian countries were in the lower right and Sub-Saharan Africa in the upper left). The bubble sizes help you follow the most populous countries, such as India and China. These charts are based on the Trendalyzer technology we acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, which we’ve previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and theVisualization API.
With a handful of data providers, there are already billions of possible charts to explore. We currently provide data from the same three providers currently available in our search feature: the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, we’ve added five new data providers: the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. We’re excited that all around the world new data providers are deciding to make their information freely available on the Internet, enabling innovators to create interesting applications, mash up the data in new ways and discover profound meaning behind the numbers.
We hope our list and new tool help demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you, so please share your feedback in our discussion forum. If you’re a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us.
Posted by Jürgen Schwärzler, Statistician, Public Data team
A recently released Google Labs product called Fusion Tables allowed users to grab data from spreadsheets, text documents, PDFs and other sources and create compelling, comprehensive visualizations from a merged data set.Google has just announced it’s releasing an API for Fusion Tables. The API integrates with Google Maps, App Engine, Base Data and Visualizations APIs, as well, to allow for motion charts, timelines, graphs and maps with all the data available and running on Google’s infrastructure. The API allows users to upload data from any source, from text files to full databases, and see their data merged and compared in cool visualizations. Surprisingly, that’s not even the best part.
Perhaps best of all, for active, dynamic datasets, Fusion Tables is programmatically updated and accessed, so new information is accessible without requiring an admin login to the Fusion Tables site. As data is added or altered, the most up-to-date version will be available as long as the dataset is synced to Fusion Tables.
The Fusion Tables API also allows for queries and downloads. It’s built on a subset of SQL. By referencing data values in SQL-like query expressions, developers can find data and download it for use by their app. The application can then do any kind of processing on the data, like computing aggregates or feeding into a visualization gadget.
Visualizations of data can be embedded in blogs and other sites all around the web, and attribution remains constant for all the data that is uploaded to Fusion Tables.
Another cool aspect of Fusion Tables is its real-time collaboration features. As with Google Docs, collaborators can be invited via email. Multiple people can view and comment on the data, and these discussions show users’ commments and any changes to the datasets over time.
For an overview of how Fusion Tables works, check out this demo video that explains how data can be mashed up and graphed:
Vislets: From Professor Mikael Jern, mailto: mikael.jern@liu.se
GeoAnalytics has so far focused on visual tools that analyze and explore data to discover trends and patterns. These tools should also address challenges in support of an integrated editorial and related authoring process with the goal to advance research critical to educational production and publishing. In this context, NCVA now introduces GeoAnalytics tools for Web enabled publication of temporal and multidimensional statistical data, facilitating a seamless integrated authoring tool (Open eXplorer) and storytelling mechanism including automatic generation of HTML code to be embedded as a dynamic visualization with associate metadata “Vislet” into blogs, wikis etc.
The novel “storytelling” framework provides means for the analyst and author to:
The analyst (author) uses eXplorer to import any national or sub-national statistical data, explore and make discoveries through trends and patterns and derive insight. Gained knowledge is the foundation for creating a story that can be shared with colleagues and reach consensus and trust. The visual discoveries are captured into snapshots together with descriptive metadata and hyperlinks in relation to the analytics reasoning. The author gets feedback from colleagues, adopts the story and finally publishes “tell-a-story” to the community using a Vislet that is embedded in blogs or wikis.
This seamless integration (figure) of an authoring, storytelling and publishing solution is based on experience and prototypes developed by NCVA during the last decade and could advance the state of the art in statistical geovisualization publishing facilitating:
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