There’s a hot topic concerning official statistics as well as many governmental bodies owning data: open government data OGD.
Official statistics in most countries offer open data for years now. But mostly in their own silos and in various flavors: From PDF to XLS and CSV to RDF LOD, in interactive databases like px-web, oecd.stat, genesis-online etc., with visualization tools and various search facilities.
On the other hand there are initiatives to provide software, create standards and build platforms in order to bring together myriads of data sets and making these accessible in one place.
http://thedatahub.org/ is such a platform assembling more than 3800 datasets (June 2012).
Thedatahub.org is powerd by a software called CKAN
… claiming to be …
.
What about official statistics?
the Data Hub contains a lot of data sets from official statistics
Among these are simple links to National Statistical Institutes
But also machine readable linked open data
.
Several institutions are using CKAN with their own themes.
UK (in CKAN). The Office for National Statistics ONS shows a lot of data (847 data sets) in the CKAN powered catalogue, with rich metadata and links to the ONS website.
EU (in CKAN). Europe’s Public Data aggregates datasets from several sources,
.
CKAN Data Store
As far as I can see statistical institutions use CKAN as a catalogue linking to the sources on the institution’s websites. But CKAN could also be a host for the data itself:
‘As well as holding metadata and links to the offsite data, CKAN can provide secure storage for the data itself. When creating the dataset or resource, you can either link to data hosted elsewhere, or upload it in the same action as registering it on CKAN.’ (link to CKAN).
It would be very interesting to know who in official statistics already envisages such a solution for it’s data ….!
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