Adapting to an open data world: delivering international data for

education and research in the UK

Dr Jackie CarterMimas, University of Manchester, UK

E: j.carter@manchester.ac.uk T:JackieCarter

Acknowledgments:

Simon Industrial Fellowship Fund, University of Manchester, UK

ESDS-International TeamRSS getstats campaign

Open University SCORE Teaching Fellowship ProgrammeWorld Bank

Outline of Talk

1. What’s Mimas? What’s ESDS? Who am I?2. What’s happening in the UK?

– Royal Statistical Society (RSS) getstats– Economic and Social Science Research Council

(ESRC) and British Academy

3. Open University Teaching Fellowship Project– Open Educational Resources (OER)– Statistical literacy & sharing best practice

4. Adapting to an open data world

1. What’s Mimas?

mimas.ac.uk

A Nationally designated data centre

A Centre of Excellence based in the University of Manchester

An organisation of uniquely skilled experts

A provider of world-class data and information resources to support research, learning and teaching

mimas.ac.uk/about/partners

mimas.ac.uk/about/portfolio

1. What’s ESDS?

The Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS)www.esds.ac.uk

• national data archiving and dissemination service for social science data

• principal data service for UK academic social science community• core archiving services plus four specialist data services

• ESDS International• ESDS Government• ESDS Longitudinal • ESDS Qualidataprovide:

dedicated web sites data and documentation enhancements user support training

www.esds.ac.uk/international

ESDS International• is run by Mimas and UK Data Archive

• promotes the use of international datasets in research and teaching across a range of disciplines

• provides free web-based access to key international macro level databanks

• helps users locate and acquire international micro level datasets

• Freely available to UK FE and HE – open data is open access!

• Authenticated via federated access (Shibboleth) and ESDS online registration

• Delivered via Beyond 20/20 Web Data Server (WDS) – moving to .STAT

• Download formats include *.xls, *.csv and *.ivt

Aggregate data portfolio …

International Monetary Fund Direction of Trade Statistics Balance of Payments Statistics Government Finance Statistics International Financial Statistics World Economic Outlook

World Bank World Development Indicators World Bank Global Development Finance Africa Development Indicators

United Nations Common Database COMTRADE

United Nations Industrial Development Organization Industrial Statistics Databases Demand Supply Databases

ESDS International provides free online access to the full versions of the latest releases of these databases to the UK academic community.

Aggregate data portfolio (cont)

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD Education Statistics OECD Globalisation OECD International Development OECD International Direct Investment Statistics OECD International Migration Statistics OECD International Trade by Commodities Statistics OECD Main Economic Indicators OECD Main Science and Technology Indicators OECD National Accounts OECD Quarterly Labour Force Statistics OECD Services Statistics OECD STructural ANalysisOECD Social Expenditure Database

International Energy AgencyCoal InformationCO2 Emissions from Fuel CombustionElectricity informationEnergy Prices and TaxesEnergy Technology Research and Development DatabaseNatural Gas InformationOil InformationRenewables InformationWorld Energy Statistics and Balances

Eurostat New Cronos

ESDS-I Value-Add

Academics value: being able to search and access all the data using a single interfacehelpdesk – authoritative advicedataset and software user guides www.esds.ac.uk/international/support/dataset_guides.asp

www.esds.ac.uk/international/support/software_guides.asp

video help guides esds.ac.uk/International/support/video-guides.asp

training www.esds.ac.uk/international/support/teach.asp

Annual conference to meet with data providers, give early career researchers opportunity to presentwww.esds.ac.uk/international/news/confproc.asp

Source: ESDS Annual Report 2009-10: http://www.esds.ac.uk/news/publications/ESDSAnnualReport2009-2010.pdf

What do Academics Want? Research requirements for cross-national data. Russell, Murphy, Gemmell (3rd OECD World Forum, Busan, 2009)

http://bit.ly/yPjOr7

Foreign direct investment in particular ranked highly across all the frequentlyselected countries. Series relating to education are of particular interest, inparticular expenditure on education, and educational outcomes such as attainmentand the fraction of the labour force with a secondary education.

http://www.esds.ac.uk/international/news/mapusage.asp?print=1

http://www.esds.ac.uk/resources/datainuse/casestudies.asp

The UK Data Service

• A new UK Data Service (UKDS) is being commissioned for launch in Fall 2012

• The new service will bring together current ESRC data services into a single resource to provide a more unified, simpler and seamless access to data resources

• This includes the data currently hosted by ESDS International

1. Who am I?

• Senior manager for socioeconomic data and learning and teaching services

• Director for Jorum (jorum.ac.uk) a national teaching and learning repository

• Teaching Fellow for the Open University’s Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE)

• Interested in use of data in teaching

2. What’s happening in the UK?Royal Statistical Society RSS

www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/161599/new-campaign-offers-tips-to-help-journalists-get-their-numbers-straight/

2. What’s happening in the UK?Funding for Quantitative Methods (QM)

• Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and British Academy– Curriculum Innovation and Research Developer

Initiative• ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative• Nuffield Foundation

– QM for undergraduate social scientists

Quantitative Social Sciences: A Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subject Area

Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and British Academy

www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/funding-opportunities/15407/latest-opportunity-13.aspx

Curriculum Innovation

Curriculum Innovation

Researcher Developer Initiative (RDI)

Researcher Developer Initiative (RDI)

www.esrc.ac.uk/news-and-events/press-releases/19172/technology-boost-for-maths-skills.aspx

www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/funding-opportunities/19214/secondary-data-analysis-initiative-phase-12012.aspx

Secondary Data Analysis Initiative (phase 1)

www.nuffieldfoundation.org/quantitative-methods-undergraduate-social-scientists

Nuffield Foundation (‘imminent’)

• Usage Aug 2010 – Jul 2011

– Countries and Citizens: Unique page views: 15,928

– UNMDGs: Unique page views: 3,294

– Teaching Tools: Unique page views: 2,325 (from 28 Oct 2010)

ESDS-I Value-Add for Teaching

Developed by Susan Noble and Richard Wiseman

Received e-learning commendation by Economics Network

3. Open University Teaching Fellowship

The aims of this project are to share teaching resources and expertise in those institutions already working to upskill students in QM; and to focus on resources that address global issues by using real world data

The resulting open educational resources (OER) will be accompanied by ‘stories’ or narratives of exemplar usage, engaging social science learners with QM. The focus will be away from economics and psychology

Progress to date• Interviewed:

– Staff from 6 universities• Leeds Metropolitan, Plymouth, London School of Economics and Political Science, Cardiff,

Manchester Metropolitan, University of Manchester

– Policy related – Save the Children– RSS Statistical Education Centre

• Attended:– BBC Data Journalist course – Sources, Scoops and Spreadsheets

• Planned:– NCRM (National Centre for Research Methods) colleagues in Southampton– Speak to all RDI/CI award holders– Involvement in an RDI bid at University of Manchester

• Speaking at:– OER12 conference, Cambridge, UK 2012– 2012RC33 Eighth International Conference on Social Science Methodology, Sydney, July

2012

Findings to date

• Few lecturers are using data at undergraduate level in social science classes (except economics)

• If data used, mainly in lectures – hands-on is difficult• Students hard to enthuse with data

– But the innovative lecturers are attempting to do this• Sharing of open educational resources

– It’s going to be a long hard slog!– BUT willingness to share amongst peers as long as

attribution is clear• Link to skills and employability is important

Some outputs

www.scoop.it/t/statistical-data-literacy

Carter, J., Noble, S., Russell, A., Swanson, E. (2011). Developing Statistical Literacy Using Real World Data: Investigating Socioeconomic Secondary Data Resources used in Research and Teaching International Journal of Research & Method in Education, Taylor & Francis.

What about openness?

• Is open a step too far for some?

• Where to share?• How to develop a

community• It’s about open practice

not just open educational resources

http://bit.ly/vFwt32

Sharing on the commons

4. Adapting to an open data world

• Open data under open licenses• Open data under open technologies

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Downloads of Highest Usage DatasetsIEA Moving average (IEA) IMF CombinedMoving average (IMF Combined) OECD Moving average (OECD)World Bank Moving average (World Bank)

WB opens data

ESDS opens WB data

Data Ingest

• ESDS-I currently ingest data in many different formats CSV, Access,

SDMX, etc…

• We convert all these to IVT for delivery via Beyond 20/20 Web Data

Server

• Encouraging our data providers to make

their data available as SDMX-ML

• Currently ingesting OECD data in SDMX

and expecting IMF data in SDMX this year

SIS-CC

• Member of the Statistical Information Systems Collaboration Community (SIS-CC)

• led by OECD

• 7 members including IMF, European Commission, ABS, IStat, Stats New Zealand

• SIS-CC workshop being held in Paris in March

• ESDS-I is in the process of implementing the .Stat dissemination platform, which will:

• Make ingest of data (particularly SDMX data) easier

• Allow us to implement an SDMX Web Service

• Significantly improve the interface for ESDS users

Linked Data

ESDS-I has:• Published the World Development Indicators as Linked Data

• Used World Bank Databank to extract WDI as SDMX

• Used RDF Data Cube vocabulary to map the SDMX to RDF

• XSL Transformations used to create RDF

• Currently working on Linking this to other sources of Linked Data,

tutorial on use and demonstration product

• For details of the process see - http://mimasld.wordpress.com

• With thanks to Paul Murphy for these slides – and questions to

him….

CAIRD3/InFuse Project

Funded by the ESRC and the ONS, we’re aiming to make the Census easier to use by working with multidimensional data sets.

infuse.mimas.ac.uk

"It's vital to help users of the Census to express their needs in simple terms and so swiftly find what they want, without specialist knowledge…

the Infuse project has already made great progress towards removing barriers to access."

Keith Dugmore, Demographic Decisions Ltd

Thank you and questions

Dr Jackie CarterMimas, University of Manchester, UK

E: j.carter@manchester.ac.uk T:JackieCarter