StatSpace: A Unified Platform for Statistical Data Exploration

In recent years, the amount of statistical data available on the web has been growing fast. Numerous organizations and governments publish data sets in a multitude of formats and encodings, using different scales, and providing access through a wide range of mechanisms. Due to such inconsistent publishing practices, integrated analysis of statistical data is challenging. StatSpace tackles this problem through semantic integration and provides uniform access to disparate statistical data. At present, it incorporates more than 1,800 data sets published by a variety of data providers including the World Bank, the European Union, and the European Environment Agency. StatSpace transparently lifts data from raw sources, maps geographical and temporal dimensions, aligns value ranges, and allows users to explore and integrate the previously isolated data sets. This paper introduces the constituent elements of the StatSpace architecture – i.e., a metadata repository, URI design patterns, and supporting services – and demonstrates the usefulness of the resulting Linked Data infrastructure by means of use case examples.