Thursday, October 25, 2012

Eurostat Country Profiles app for mobile access

http://market.android.com/search?q=pname:eurostat.ec.europa.eu.country.profils

The Eurostat Country Profiles application gives mobile access to the main statistical data for the EU and its Member States, the euro area, EFTA countries, EU candidate countries and a few other countries. The update function allows the downloading of the freshest data from the Eurostat data server. For more information and other data see also Eurostat's website at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat.




Friday, October 19, 2012

Big Data, Big Time: Statistical Capacity Development 2.0 | paris21.org

From PARIS21: Big Data, Big Time: Statistical Capacity Development 2.0 | paris21.org
date: 
 17 October 2012
There is an ever increasing demand by policy makers, academics, civil society and business for data on all aspects of society, economy and life. Against this background, the recent phenomenon of an emergence of “big data” including data from official and non-official sources such as call logs, mobile-banking transactions, polling results, online user-generated content, satellite images, etc. should be very welcome.

But, there is an emerging concern that big data might also lead to very important negative consequences such as the publishing of data of bad quality and without any accountability mechanism, a possibly confusion of the public by showing different data depending on the sources and most importantly on under-mining if not crowding out the statistical capacity at country level, in particular in developing countries.

In this context, PARIS21 has organised a lunch-time seminar to address how development practioners can maximize the opportunities and minimize the risks coming from the big data movement for building statistical capacities in developing countries.

The seminar, which was attended by around 50 participants, took place on the 17th of October in the framework of the 4th OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy in New Delhi, India which started on the 16th of October and will last till the 19th.

It was a lively debate discussing issues around data production – public versus private ; data quality – good or bad and the need for institutional frameworks that define the role of each action in the statistical landscape.

The debate was moderated by Johannes JÜTTING, Manager of PARIS21 Secretariat, with a panel composed of Mohamed TAAMOUTI, Director of the Moroccan Statistics Office and Robert MANCHIN, Managing Director of The Gallup Organisation Europe.

For more information on the 4th OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy click here
 

Open data is the theme for this year’s Cathie Marsh Memorial Lecture | RSSeNews

Open data is the theme for this year’s Cathie Marsh Memorial Lecture | RSSeNews:
October 18, 2012   News

The government’s open data initiative will be under the spotlight in the 2012 Cathie Marsh Memorial Lecture at the Royal Statistical Society on 13 November, 2012.



The lecture this year features three expert speakers in this area: Iain Bell, deputy director, public sector and household at the Office for National Statistics; Simon Briscoe, special advisor (statistics) to the Public Administration Select Committee and deputy chair of the UK Data Service; and Peter Elias, professor at the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick.

Read more....

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Panopticon 6: Revolutionary advanced data visualization system

From: http://www.panopticon.com/webinar/50
Webinars > Panopticon 6: Revolutionary advanced data visualization system
Panopticon 6 is the latest generation of our advanced data visualization software suite. It is the next level in real-time visual data analysis and offers a huge range of functionality and deployment options. 
In this webinar, Panopticon's Chief Architect Ludvig Sandman demonstrates the new mobile capabilities of the platform and explain how to use Panopticon 6 to embed our in-memory OLAP and visualization functions into your own enterprise applications.
Panopticon 6 incorporates:
  • Ability to visualize data from true real-time streaming sources, including message queues, CEP engines and tick databases
  • Ability to federate data from multiple sources and combine them in a single visualization or in multi-visualization dashboards
  • Ability to fully embed our StreamCube OLAP in-memory data model and our data visualizations into third party applications
  • HTML5 and Java view clients for delivery of fully interactive dashboards to any desktop or mobile device
  • Specialized Smartphone visualization functions
  • Native connectors for Active MQ, Apache Qpid and Progress Sonic MQ message buses
  • Native connectors for StreamBase, OneTick CEP, SAP Sybase ESP, and Oracle CEP engines
  • Native connectors for in-memory data management systems like SAP HANA
  • Native connectors for high performance columnar tick databases, including SAP Sybase IQ, Kx Kdb+, OneTick, and Thomson Reuters Velocity Analytics
  • ODBC sources
  • Files including Microsoft Excel, CSV, SVG, and XML
  • Sophisticated offline reporting capabilities
     

Monday, October 15, 2012

Blog about Stats: IMAODBC 2012: And the winner is …

From: Blog about Stats ~ All about Dissemination of (Official) Statistics
http://blogstats.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/imaodbc-2012-and-the-winner-is/
The Bo Sundgren Award of the International Marketing and Output Database Conference IMAODBC 2012 in Pruhonice near Prag goes to Alain Nadeau from the  Swiss Federal Statistical Office FSO.
In his contribution Alain showed how the renovation of the FSO website can go together with a more open data-oriented publishing. This by separating the three layers of the application.
One of the databases in the data layer is planned to be in the linked open data format, the 5star format described by Tim Berners-Lee. A prototype is under way and first experiences will show up beginning 2013.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Big Data Reaches The Hill: A Guide To Making It More Actionable

AOL Gov

From: AolGovernment  Big Data Reaches The Hill: A Guide To Making It More Actionable



Published: October 10, 2012
Big Data Reaches The Hill: A Guide To Making It More Actionable
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What Congress should do to help big data
  • Allow access to confidential data such as the Census data centers
  • Allow sharing between statistical agencies
  • Have a chief data dfficer that promotes a federal data science community of data scientists and statisticians
The federal government should first focus on the value of big data
  • Hadoop projects are costing 50 times more than expected
  • DHS failed fast with a big data in the cloud project, but quickly and at less cost
  • Semantic Medline on the Cray Graph Computer in an example of a federal data science team project with value
The federal government should foster real innovation with government data
  • Encourage private industry to add value to government data
  • Consider having the federal government's chief statistician be the chief data officer
  • Empower the government's data scientists and statisticians to analyze big data and statistical data

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Danish Ministry of Finance: Good basic data for everyone

From: http://uk.fm.dk/publications/2012/good-basic-data-for-everyone/
Publication frontpage - Godd basic data for everyone

Public authorities in Denmark register various core information about individuals, businesses, real properties, buildings, addresses, and more. This information, called basic data, is re-used throughout the public sector. Re-use of high-quality data is an essential basis for public authorities to perform their tasks properly and efficiently across units, administrations and sectors.

Basic data is an important contribution to modernising the public sector. The public and businesses are provided a better and more efficient service, when data that has already been recorded is shared across institutions and is included directly in case processing. Furthermore, employees in the public sector will be less burdened by repetitive and routine tasks, and this, in turn, will release more resources for increased welfare in e.g. the healthcare and education sectors.

However, open and homogenous re-use of basic data also has great value for the private sector, partly because businesses use this data in their internal processes and, partly, because the information contained in public-sector data can be exploited for entirely new products and solutions, in particular digital ones. In short, basic data freely available to the private sector is a potential driver for innovation, growth and job creation.

Read "Good basic data for everyone - a driver for growth and efficiency here [2.967 KB]