The last one … and reflections about new ones

The last one

This is the last one as The Globe and Mail reports

‘Statistics Canada published the last edition of its longest-running publication on Tuesday. It is the last such print publication and will not continue as an online resource. After 145 years of documenting the country’s history, the Canada Year Book will no longer be published.’

“In the future, we will have summary tables that have the exact same information as in the Canada Year Book, but it’s up to date every month or every three months…the new way of accessing information is online so we’re just moving to that,” said Statscan’s Ms. Beaudoin.

TAVIA GRANT, The Globe and Mail, Published Tuesday, Nov. 13 2012, 4:12 PM EST

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And plans …

… for ‘a book about Digital Publishing and new ways to organize, create and deliver media experience.

Publishing is emerging into a new kind of media situated directly between print, web and motion. It combines the best of these worlds and creates a completely new kind of experience.

By doing so Digital Publishing bridges the gap between so called “classic” and “new” media. Also publishing for iPad, Kindle Fire and other tablet and smartphone devices is heavily influencing the way we look at this “other” media.

This requires a completely new approach to publishing and media production.’

Embrasser l’univers

From the New York Times:
“PARIS — Google, which organizes the world’s information digitally, is linking up with a precursor that aimed to do something similar, on paper.
It plans to announce Tuesday [13 March 2012] that it is forming a partnership with a museum in Mons, Belgium, dedicated to a long-ago venture to compile and index knowledge in a giant, library-style card catalog with millions of entries — an analog-era equivalent of a search engine or Wikipedia. …
… Long before them, in 1895, two Belgians, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, began the project that grew into the Mundaneum. Their card catalog, initially called the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, compiled links to books, newspaper and magazine articles, pictures and other documents from libraries and archives around the world. People were able to submit queries via the mail or telegraph. The collection expanded to 16 million cards, and Mr. Otlet and Mr. La Fontaine envisioned a “city of knowledge,” complete with museum exhibits and other archival material. …
…The partnership is part of a broader campaign by Google to demonstrate that it is a friend of European culture, at a time when its services are being investigated by regulators on a variety of fronts.’

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 book online through the beautiful web-based book reader or download in a number of formats that allow for high quality printing. For free.

Timetric Makes Web Data Useful with Time Series Analysis

Timetric Makes Web Data Useful with Time Series Analysis (from ReadWriteSTART)

Written by Jolie O’Dell / August 5, 2009 8:40 PM / 0 Comments

« Prior Post

This post is part of our ReadWriteStart channel, which is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. The channel is sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. To sign up for BizSpark, click here.

A winner at this year’s mini-Seedcamp in London, Timetric is an app from Inkling Software, a three-principle shop composed of chemistry and physics PhDs.

The premise is fairly simple: Timetric was created to store, share, and analyze data over time. For predicting trends, proving assertions, or recommending actions, time series analysis is a highly valuable tool. It’s Facebook’s Lexicon all grown up and actually useful, pulling data from all over the web and querying this huge database to serve significant results.

ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 1: Linked Data

Written by Richard MacManus / July 8, 2009 6:00 AM / 8 Comments

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How Linked Data Relates to The Semantic Web

RWW: Earlier this year you gave an inspiring talk at TED about Linked Data. You described Linked Data as a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself – i.e. we’ve gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data. Can you please explain though how Linked Data relates to the Semantic Web, is it a subset of it?

TBL: They fit in completely, in that the linked data actually uses a small slice of all the various technologies that people have put together and standardized for the Semantic Web.

Linked Data uses a small slice of the technologies that make up the Semantic Web.

We started off with the Semantic Web roadmap, which had lots of languages that we wanted to create. [However] the community as a whole got a bit distracted from the idea that actually the most important piece is the interoperability of the data. The fact that things are identified with URIs is the key thing.

The Semantic Web and Linked Data connect because when we’ve got this web of linked data, there are already lots of technologies which exist to do fancy things with it. But it’s time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus

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Linked Data and Governments

RWW: In a recent Design Issues note, you urge governments to put their data online as Linked Data (although you’d also be happy for governments to just make available the raw data – presumably so that others can then structure it). What do you realistically expect, for example, the U.S. or U.K. governments to do over the next year? And in the near future, do you foresee different governments interconnecting their Linked Data sets?

TBL: One can’t generalize, governments are (like most big organizations) fascinatingly diverse inside them. So you’ll find that there are places inside governments where you get a champion who gets linked data and who’s just written a script and produced some linked data. So in the UK government for example, you’ll find there’s RDFa [in the code of its website] for civil service jobs. So if somebody wants to make a database of all the jobs, they can do that very easily.

“The first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do.”

There are other cases where the easiest thing for somebody to do is to just put data up in whatever form it’s available. Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular. They’re exported sometimes from spreadsheets. It’s remarkable how much information is in spreadsheets. Or sometimes pulled out of a database and then put up on the web. It’s not as good, not as useful to the community, as if Linked Data had been put up there and linked. But the first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do.

Data.gov, a catalog of public data, was launched in May by the U.S. government

The way to go is for government departments to go the extra step and convert [their data] into Linked Data. One of the nice things about Linked Data, when they have a pile of it, is that they could run a SPARQL server on it. SPARQL servers are a commodity product, a solution for all of the people who say ‘but actually I wanted to have XML.’ A SPARQL server will generate an XML file [and] allow somebody to write out, effectively, a URL for the XML file.

“Linked Data is the backplane, it’s the thing that you connect to in both directions.”

In fact, I don’t see why SPARQL servers shouldn’t provide CSV files, something which as far as I know isn’t in the standards. But I’d recommend it, certainly in government context, because CSV files are what people have and what people want.

So the message [for government] is to use RDF. Linked Data is the backplane, it’s the thing that you connect to in both directions. As a [web] producer your job is to make sure that you produce Linked Data one way or another. And as a consumer, there are lots of ways to consume that data once it’s out there as Linked Data.

Read more…..

History of official statistics from Google News

The prevalence of the search term seems to be visualised in relation to years occurring in the text. Design it yourself by choosing new year intervals and by putting in the name of your National Statistical Institute. Of course it is also possible to choose statistical subject matter areas, e.g “national accounts”, or any other search term related to staistics or something else with a precise content. Usable for research? Or analysis of progress for statistics  or your NSI in media?

Wired: Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data

The following is an extract from Wired Magazine Blog. It may show some light on plans from Google regarding statistical data storage and visualisation of interest for the statistical community and official statistics:

By Alexis Madrigal January 18, 2008 | 2:23:21 PMCategories: Dataset, Research

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.Building on the company’s acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features. More…….

Data sharing: the next generation

This is the title of Declan Butler’s article that has been published in “nature” some days ago. He discusses social software and especially the “social” visualization tools Swivel and Many eyes (see blogstats post 05-03-2007).

Two interesting statements in this article:

“If research organizations and journals linked the raw data behind papers to social software tools such as Swivel and Many Eyes, he (Brent Edwards, director of the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California) argues, “it would have considerable value to the scientific community as a whole””. And: ” …the collective intelligence and expertise of users will result in new insights (Fernanda Viégas of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts)”.

See the full article here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7131/full/446010b.html

Or try the permanent link, go to http://doi.org/ and put the number of the article in the text box. The number is: 10.1038/446010b.  Archiving and permanent links are another topic to look at later on!