An innovative way to provide easy access to UN System data

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An innovative way to provideeasy access to UN
System data
CCSA Conference on Data Quality for International
Organizations
Stefan Schweinfest and Mary Jane Holupka, United
Nations Statistics Division
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UNdata and Quality (2)

• Introduction
• UNdata and accessibility
• Searching
• Data presentation
• Customization possibilities for users
• Metadata
• Addressing other quality dimensions relevance,
  accuracy, comparability, timeliness
• Challenges ahead

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UNdata Introduction (3)

• 60 years of data collection
• Data stored in numerous databases different web
  interfaces different access and dissemination
  policies
• Driving force for UNdatas development reduce
  fragmentation
• Statistics as a Public Good Project with
  Statistics Sweden, Gapminder Foundation,
  financial support from the Swedish Intl
  Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)
• Provide easier access, increase dissemination,
  use and understanding of intl stats, free of
  charge

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UNdata Accessibility
(4)

• available free of charge, no need to subscribe or
  register
• one interface from which all underlying datasets
  can be searched and browsed
• easily searchable by either using the search box
  or clicking on a particular dataset name and
  browsing its contents
• requires few clicks to get where one wants to go
  
• presents data clearly, in simple tabular
  presentation formats, which can then be
  customized and further refined by sorting,
  filtering, including/excluding columns and
  pivoting
• provides various download formats (xml or value
  separated for data received in relational
  database format, or excel tables if the original
  data were provided in that format)
• Understandability/clarity
• links to or provides relevant accompanying
  metadata.

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Bringing Information to the World
UNdata partners
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UNdata Coverage (6)
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UNdata Search by country name (7)
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Search by keyword default data presentation
(8)
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Customized table after filtering, sorting and
pivoting download formats (9)
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UNdata Wiki Metadata and more (10)
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UNdata Administration tool to help assess
relevance (11)
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UNdata in the future (12)

• More data, more partners
• More explanatory metadata
• More timely updates
• More search fine-tuning
• More visualization tools
• More languages
• More databases included, perhaps from countries
  NSOs