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eu-waste-data-investigation

README.adoc

A look at stats oriented websites in the EU that provide data about waste

statistics.gov.scot

My previous report looked at statistics.gov.scot‘s machine-oriented SPARQL interface and praised them for having curated a sizeable number of dataset into linked open data. Their platform also provides a human oriented web page based interface for:

  1. searching through the metadata of all curated datasets;

  2. filtering a dataset by dimensions, measures and value ranges to make it more manageable for displaying in a tabular formats or in charts;

  3. creating custom combinations of subsets of datasets using its data cart feature.

Feature 1 is intuitive to use. Features 2 & 3 require some effort (to understand the data model) to use.

(The size-and-shape executable notebook shows how they structure each dataset in terms of dimensions, measures and code-lists.)

eurostat

The eurostat website makes over 300 million observations available as open data. It has many nice features including:

  • an engaging splash page that informs the user about what’s new, what’s trending, focus article, popular datasets and indicators;

  • a nice tree-view navigations of the Eurostat datasets;

  • some great visualisations (including Sankey charts that would be great for depicting the processing flows of our Scottish waste);

  • a highly useful FAQs section;

  • making many of the datasets available as linked data (using the pragmatic SDMX approach);

  • a user friendly, intuitive and customisable tabular view of datasets, e.g.:

eurostat tabular

The eurostat-waste-data executable notebook investigates the municipal waste dataset that is shown above. At the end of the experiment, the percentage of waste recycled per country per year is calculated and graphed. This graph – from the European Environment Agency (EEA) – is used to help corroborate the figures calculated in the lab note. And the EEA is the subject of the next section.

European Environment Agency

The European Environment Agency (EEA) website provides some of the features of its eurostat sister site. In addition to those, its features of note include:

  • 596 linked open data datasets (accessible very a seemingly fast SPARQL engine);

  • listed with each dataset is a number of pre-defined, informative charts, e.g.

eea embeddable charts

that can be easily re-used in users’ own documents as a static images or as an interactive charts; * also, listed with each dataset are the reports and indicators that make use of the dataset.

Conclusions

There is something to be learnt from these 3 platforms. Each sets the bar for particular features:

  • statistics.gov.scot / its contractor Swirrl IT, for open sourcing some of its linked open data modelling approaches and tool chain;

  • Eurostat for its user friendly navigation over its catalogue of datasets and for its great tabular presentation of a dataset;

  • EEA for maintaining a large number of datasets as (SPARQL supporting, RDF based) linked open data.