IMAODBC 2011: And the winner is …

The Bo Sundgren Award of the International Marketing and Output Database Conference IMAODBC 2011 in Obidos Portugal goes to Xavier Badosa from the  Statistical Institute of  Catalonia Idescat.

In his contribution Xavier presented a change of focus or even of paradigm in disseminating official statistics. This gives an interesting insight in developments some offices (like i.e. idescat) have already made or are about to discuss:

His presentation is on slideshare

A short abstract in 4 points

1) The mission

Not (only) dedicated statistical articles or products but a (open-) data  infrastructure.

2) The market

The data infrastructure as THE statistical reference of a country.

3) The offer

A platform which provides access to data for reuse in a new way elsewhere (a hat for everyone). As Open Data under Creative Commons licence BY.

4) The operationalisation

APIs and

widgets

In the end the website of Idescat uses its own platform to present a mashup of data. This platform provides malleable data but not explaining texts in the sense of storytelling. This will be a next challenge.

Congratulations to @badosa for his awesome presentation – not only concerning content but also aesthetics!

Statistics in World Philately

Statistics Spain publishes another view on statistics: stamps.

Celebrating World Statistics day a beautiful brochure and web presentation show stamps from all over the world illustrating statistical topics.

Some examples:

Statistics Sweden social media contribution to Eurostat “Sponsorship on Communication”

http://swedeneurostat.blogspot.com/

The blog  is an example on how to extract and visualise Eurostat statistics. It is a Statistics Sweden prototype within the Eurostat project called “Sponsorship on Communication”. The project is initiated by the Spanish NSI during their present EU chairmanship. All member countries have been invited to contribute.

The idea from Statistics Sweden is to focus on Sweden in the European statistical context in a blog based on publishing from Eurostat, e.g. Statistics in Focus and other European data . Information and data connects to social media functionality. It can be RSS flows based on regular Eurostat and Statistics Sweden publishing and on blog and Twitter searches. Any other country within EU can apply the approach to their own country from this framework.

The search functions are from Google. The information flow in the blog list is constructed from Google Blogger widgets. New ones can be added and obsolete ones can  easily be replaced. They automatically update the flow of  information once they are defined.

In the module “Latest Search Results about Eurostat and Sweden”  pre-defined search terms are presenting results directed to different  media like images, videos, news, blogs, updates, books and discussions. They can also be categorised in time, geography and related to different search terms.

By enter key words at  “Search this blog” extended alternatives are presented to widen the scope of search to sites linked from the blog, the blog list, Statistics Sweden and Eurostat publishing and finally the whole web. So universal search is combined with more narrowly defined search destinations depending on how the blog is organised.

There is also news roll displaying information from different news media continuously through a widget. Also this information is updated automatically and search words can be changed or extended.

The scope and functionality will be tested and developed. It has been presented to journalists and media so far. We have recently included also an example of interactive publishing including statistical story telling through Vislets, developed by Professor Mikael Jern, NCVA, Linköping University, Sweden. Click on picture below for only this entry or on Sweden in Eurostat for the entire blog.

PC-Axis and Gapminder?

See http://www.pc-axis.scb.se
PC-Axis and PX-Web are software used in several countries for dissemination of official statistics. PC-Axis is a windows browser and PX-Web is for the Web and both are based on the PC-Axis file format. The PC-Axis file format is very meta data rich and should be a nice way to forward statistics into the Gapminder/Google/Trendalyzer. Most of the data are in time series. A lot of data is available in this format from many National Statistical Offices over the world. Some countries in Europe: Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe etc. Links to these websites are available in the link above.
The PC-Axis file format is an open format in plain ascii and should be very easy to utilize as input for Trendalyzer. Perhaps this is something for Google to check.
Lars Nordback,  mailto:lars.nordback@scb.se