Unsolicited advice for large governmental data providers
From the post:
We source data from a number of large national, and trans-national, statistical bodies, like the Office of National Statistics here in the UK, or Eurostat. Downloading useful data from organizations like this is sometimes a tricky job – although publishing data is usually part of their raison d’être, they’re not usually thinking of people like us – Big Data geeks – when making their data available. And often, their methods of making data available have been essentially unchanged for the past ten or fifteen years, and even then are probably based on processes predating the Internet.
One of the sources of value Timetric adds is simply making this data more widely available and accessible. But it’s also true that there’s so much more we could do if we could put our minds to using this data in new and exciting ways, rather than expending expertise on working out the best way to map old-fashioned data publication workflows to a web-centric way of working. So it’s an interesting question to ask – in an ideal world, how would a large statistical organization publish data for us?
There’s three aspects to this question:
- Data transfer and formats
- Metadata formats and reconciliation
- Update frequency and notifications
The advice seems UK/Euro centric to me, which works given their audience.
My question: How would you change this for governments located in other countries? Pointers to data format documentation should be included. 2-3 pages.