Eurostat has one of the toughest jobs on the planet. It's tasked with organising, cross-referencing and making available the millions of different official data sets that are generated by a union of 495m people in 27 countries - everything from birth and mortality rates, hotel rooms per country and books read per capita to government finance trends and consumer confidence indices.
So I'm excited that we've been able to include some of Eurostat's rich datasets in our new experiment, the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs. This Google Labs project is all about making public sector information (PSI) easier to use, understand and communicate using dynamic data visualisations. It's also about giving a taste of how open access to well-organised public data (such as Eurostat's broad range of statistics) can result in new applications and insights that can be of direct benefit to citizens, businesses and policy makers.
We're starting out our experiment with three Eurostat datasets: the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices in Europe, Unemployment in Europe, and Minimum Wages in Europe. We've also integrated five other international datasets, from organisations such as the World Bank and the OECD. Our aim is to make it easy to understand and compare the data, so the Data Explorer has dynamic visualisations that allow you to view the data the way that you want to view it - whether that's as a line graph, a bar graph, on a map or as bubble chart.
You can see how the statistics change over time using the time slider function under each chart. Changing topics is easy, as is readjusting the dataset you're looking at - it's just a couple of clicks. You can highlight different entries to illustrate a specific point you want to make, and you can change the scale on each chart. Once you have your visualization exactly as you want it, you can easily share it with friends or colleagues or even embed it on your own website or blog:
This map shows monthly unemployment in Europe with the latest data from Eurostat. The bubble sizes show the total number of unemployed, and the colours represent the unemployment rate (unemployed persons as a percentage of the labour force). Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time, or click "explore data" to dig deeper. These maps - and the other charts you can generate - are based on the Trendalyzer technology Google acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, which we've previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and the Visualization API.
Eurostat has been making its datasets freely available on the internet for some time now, and fully understands the potential benefits of giving European citizens and organisations open access to its data - especially given the EU's emphasis on benchmarking to promote economic reform. And although access to PSI is not always easy or uniform across Europe, there is now a clear movement emerging to make publicly funded information as widely available as possible via the internet. We're seeing more and more often that European institutions, national governments and regional public sector organisations are now not just talking about how to improve availability of public data, they're also taking action to enable innovative services and benefit citizens.
We hope our experiment helps demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you: by launching in Labs, we're explicitly asking for your feedback, which we'd love to see in our discussion forum. If you're a data provider interested to become a part of the Public Data Explorer, please do get in touch.
Posted by Ola Rosling, Product Manager, Public Data Team
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