After typing this into a closed forum window in a section for Reboot visitors, I noted that “Many of my people’ll never read this. Better blog it.” So here I go!
After experiencing the near-mythical Pecha Kucha session (aka Guy’s 20×20 talks), I was stoked about almost every subject that had been touched.
Somehow they were all connected: the impact of the talks melded and made a lasting impression — we were just overwhelmed with ideas.
Peter Rukavina’s lightning drive through the landscape of the “data that we, the public, paid for” made me start thinking of Danish public data. I’m a Swedish person, living and working in Denmark. I began sniffing at public statistics.
[Dst.dk](http://www.dst.dk) is the Danish statistics bureau (freely translated). I noted that there was an RSS feed publishing the titles of statistics tables that had had a recent change. Like a post with a title of “Farms and area with selected crops by region (County), area with the crop and unit” with the body: “AFG2”. The title is linked to the table’s website at [Statbank.dk](http://www.statbank.dk/).
Pretty cool and abstract use of RSS – machine-friendly. “Releases” is the simple title: [http://rss.dst.dk/statbankupdates](http://rss.dst.dk/statbankupdates).
When you search the data table, you come to a result page, where you have **13 export formats to choose from**.
I’ll look into what kinds of use I can put this data to. Most of it seems to be mostly for journalists & social scientists, but there just has to be some use-value to the people in there. It’s raw numbers.
Anyway, how is the public data in your country? Any hurdles to using it? Is it hard to get to? What data would you like?
[tags]reboot, reboot8, pechakucha, publicdata, syndication[/tags]