millions of users of mobile devices; and who unknowingly create a variety of potentially useful data (e.g text, numeric, images, audio, video, photographs) from sources such as blogs, Tweeter, Instagram, cell phone calls, ‘likes’ on FaceBook, mobile transactions and traffic.
That’s Big Data! a concept that is the darling of the private sector and slowly making its way into the lexicon and processes of traditional official statistics.
Big Data have important, distinct and exciting characteristics that differentiate them from traditional institutional data. As propriety data, they do not compete with but instead complement official statistics. When they are mined they become actionable information. For example, satellite imagery for environmental statistics and social media data on sentiments about national events such as elections.
According to Global Pulse (2012), Big Data can be “digitally generated, passively produced, automatically collected, geographically or temporally trackable, and continuously analysed in real time”. Now that’s powerful!
In the case of location and time, there is immense analytical value from data that are linked to a point of reference or geo-tagged. This involves linking geospatial data to Big Data and/or official statistics with information about their physical location, such as a country, community, residential address or coordinates as a means of “seeing” statistics.
Geospatial data can be used to “see” for instance, the demographic impact of a natural disaster; locate unemployment, or situate clusters of poverty.
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Integrating Big Data and geospatial data with official statistics portend exciting and revolutionary times for statistics - somewhat like the innovation of 3D and how it revolutionised the movie watching experience! Integrated data can be visualised as if they are tangible given their granularity, breadth and frequency.
Complex phenomena are easily transformed into consumable information packages, ready to be interpreted by the policy analyst, the media, the student, the academic, the politician, the citizen, all making responsible use of the data discoveries so as to effect positive changes to the justifiable facets of society.
After all is collected, geo-tagged, integrated and mined, the resulting statistics must be grounded in national realities, systems, processes and a governance framework to safeguard its reliability, validity and utility.
How then does the Commission and its attendant NSSs ready for what lies ahead with a marriage of traditional and contemporary data?
It will be the responsibility of the RSS to tame the contemporary data by imposing a structure so that they can be integrated with traditional data. As the leader of the RSS, with support from the global statistical community, and cooperation from the NSOs, the OECS Commission will drive initiatives to determine roles, responsibilities and partnerships; address privacy, technology and capacity concerns; introduce legislation and policies; and advocate the benefits the data revolution brings to monitoring and evaluating sustainable development and regional integration.
Today’s ICT innovations create a complex, interconnected and dynamic playing field for data
Integrating Big Data and geospatial data with official statistics portend exciting and revolutionary times for statistics - somewhat like the innovation of 3D and how it revolutionised the movie watching experience! Integrated data can be visualised as if they are tangible given their granularity, breadth and frequency.
Complex phenomena are easily transformed into consumable information packages, ready to be interpreted by the policy analyst, the media, the student, the academic, the politician, the citizen, all making responsible use of the data discoveries so as to effect positive changes to the justifiable facets of society.
After all is collected, geo-tagged, integrated and mined, the resulting statistics must be grounded in national realities, systems, processes and a governance framework to safeguard its reliability, validity and utility.
How then does the Commission and its attendant NSSs ready for what lies ahead with a marriage of traditional and contemporary data?
It will be the responsibility of the RSS to tame the contemporary data by imposing a structure so that they can be integrated with traditional data. As the leader of the RSS, with support from the global statistical community, and cooperation from the NSOs, the OECS Commission will drive initiatives to determine roles, responsibilities and partnerships; address privacy, technology and capacity concerns; introduce legislation and policies; and advocate the benefits the data revolution to monitoring sustainable development and regional integration.