OECD Provides Easy Access to its Stats
January 4 2008
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has launched a new beta service to make it easier to locate relevant statistical data stored in its multiple databases.
Following five years' development work to combine all 50 OECD databases into a single system, the new OECD.Stat enables users to easily search all available data and extract relevant information. It offers three key features:
- Discovery: allowing users to search for complex statistical data with one click access to the datasets
- Mix and Merge: enabling users to extract data in customisable tables from all databases in one enquiry
- Metadata: helping users to understand the origins of each number and the overall context.
'We know that one of the biggest problems people have is they know we've got the number somewhere but they don't know where, and the ability to search across databases is a step in the right direction to make our data more discoverable,' said Toby Green, Head of OECD Publishing.
Green explained that the data will now be updated in real-time, rather than monthly or annually and will be offered as a subscription-based service.
OECD.Stat is the first in a series of improvements to the organisation's iLibrary platform, which provides access to journals, books and databases. This first phase of OECD's Statistics Dissemination Project will offer a complete service by mid-2008. Another new service called OECD Core Data will provide access to OECD's most frequently requested statistics.
The organisation's Chief Statistician Enrico Giovannini added: 'The gathering of reliable and intelligent information is at the core of good politics. The challenge for the statistical tools that we are delivering today, is not only to make statistics easier to find and understand, but also to enable us to build a foundation to present information that is yet to come.'
OECD Publishing disseminates OECD's intellectual output, both analytical and statistical. The organisation's web site is at
www.oecd.org.
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
