by Ed Swires-Hennessy, Local Government Data Unit -
Wales
Ed continues his appraisals of different national Web
Sites to stimulate use of the Internet, share best practice and encourage debate.
With
holidays in mind, I looked to the sun this month and to the site of the National
Statistics Institute of Spain – English version - http://www.ine.es/welcoing.htm. A warning
appears that the data available here is not as complete as that through the Spanish
version – but much data can be found in English. The flashing graphic for INebase is
quite distracting and adds nothing. The simplicity of the left hand navigation can lead
either to the INebase data or to the TEMPUS data. Apart from INebase, the other navigation
headings have sub-menus accessed by rollovers. More use of the left-hand menu would free
the right-hand side of the page for the important new data or announcements.
The
navigation at the top of the page is simple yet effective. The information on contacts
should also be accessed through the ‘About us’. Provision of a simple street map
of each office would also help callers. Links are grouped effectively though named in
Spanish. The site map provides the extensive view of INebase: data grouped under 14 themes
which are easy to access, though some tables do require the presence of PC-Axis and its
components to get at the data. A link to download the programs is given though it would be
better to download from one of the other promoters of the product as you can have an
English version. In a few places the data in tables were left justified within the Excel
presentations. Whilst some of the text in this part of the site is only available in
Spanish, the route to the data is worth examining just to get ideas of how easily it can
be done!
The
Consumer Prices part follows the standard presentations of the data. Within the Harmonised
Indices, one is presented with a simple calendar to choose the relevant month and year;
the result is only a single data point for the countries of the EU and the data format is
unlike the standard for the rest of the site with a full-stop instead of a comma as the
decimal indicator. Elsewhere in the site the full-stop is used as a thousands’
separator – which can be confusing in a seven digit number as two full-stops appear.
For the latest month of the specific index above, the data for the UK was marked as not
available but the chart implies a ‘nil’ value.
The
availability of 400,000 time series under the TEMPUS heading is quite staggering. In
addition it is quite impressive to look at the glossary here – in English – a
model to all statisticians. A marginal problem appears under letter ‘S’ where
the alignment has shifted right. The glossary also covers acronyms – a boon for the
uninitiated and gives text in Spanish and English.
As
ever, I start the data search with population- the most commonly requested piece of data.
Using TEMPUS was easy and the system guided me through a series of selection until I had
my table very quickly on the screen. The table heading were not always translated into
English and given so one had to remember the selections. The data are selectable and can
be cut and pasted easily into Excel. The automated graphic did not produce such a good
result: the zero was missed from the scale base, exaggerating the growth in the
population, gridlines were not provided for the reader to interpret and the top figure of
the scale appeared to understate the final position.
Within Vital Statistics I tried to transfer data to my machine – and failed receiving just a ’Page cannot be found’ error when trying to download a ZIP file. If one stays with the ‘Access’ option, data are quickly provided. One can then cut and paste into Excel.
A
great site for the inquisitive with some brilliant applications to guide the novice to
data. The foundation is excellent – but this is very slightly overshadowed by the
poor shape of the frills.
This
review was undertaken using Internet Explorer version 5.0 on 3 July at 14.00 hrs GMT using
a 256 Kbit link to the Internet on a Pentium III 866 MHz machine.
Please
send and comments and suggestions for sites to review to