1. Open Statistics
Open Belgium 6 March 2017
Statistics Belgium
Lucia Decuyper
Youri Baeyesn

2. Open Statistics – Agenda
 Statistics Belgium => Open Data
• Statistics Belgium
• Open Data Start
• Statbel Open Data Portal
• Statistics Belgium in the EU
 Open Data => Linked Open Data
• 5*****?
• RDF
• LOD
• Semantic Web
• Ontologies for statisticians
• LOD in the NSIs
• RDF@statbel
 Questions
 Contact

3. Open Statistics – Statistics Belgium 1
 Statistics Belgium ?
– National Statistical Institute (before NIS)
• largest producer of official statistics in Belgium
 What do we do?
– Collect data: administrative sources (registers) or surveys
– Process and analyse data:
• common methodology, definitions (national, European)
– Publish data
• => +/- 400y releases on Statbel

4. Open Statistics – Statistics Belgium 2
 One of the core tasks consists in making all produced statistics
available to everyone (European Statistics Code of Practice)
– Website Statbel since 1997
– Free re-(use) => source
– ‘open by default’
 +/-100 statistics
– The main fields covered are population, society, work,
economy, real estate, construction, mobility and transport.
– Census

5. Open Statistics – Open Data Start?
 Why?
• 2nd PSI – directive
• Belgian Federal Open Data strategy 2015
• Digital agenda (EU)
• Eurostat => EU Open Data Portal
• Crossroad Bank Enterprises (KBO) company register
• Users
 Benefits

6. Open Statistics – Statbel Open Data Portal 1
 Open Data Portal on the Statbel website since Q4 2015 : www.statbel.fgov.be/opendata
– Population & Census
– Labour market &
living conditions
• Fiscal statistics
on income
– Environment
– Prices
• CPI
– Tools
• Geography
• Codes and Classifications

7. Open Statistics – Statbel Open Data Portal 2
 +-/ 110 datasets
 Formats
• XLSX  Excel  Pivot tables
• CSV, TXT  R, SAS, …, PostgreSQL,
• GML, SHP  QGIS, ArcGIS, … ,
• Json, XML, CSV, XLSX be.STAT=> dynamic databank of Statbel
 Special care
– Privacy
– Continuity
 Goal : 1 new dataset/month
– Next : population, households, real estate

8. Open Statistics – Statistics Belgium in the EU
 European Statistical System = Eurostat + NSI’s
– Key provider of public open data
– Draft Open Data Strategy (feb 2017)
Statistics Belgium
• Statbel.fgov.be/opendata
Eurostat
• Key contributor to the open
data portals
EU Open Data Portal
• Data.europa.eu/euodp
Belgium
• Data.gov.be
Metadata
harvesting European Data Portal
• www.europeandataportal.eu
metadata
Metadata
harvesting

9. Open Statistics – 5***** ?
 Statistics Belgium => Open Data
Statbel: Situation actuelle
Statbel: Ambition

10. Open Statistics – RDF
Resource description framework (RDF)

11. Open Statistics – RDF - Uniform resource identifier URI
 Use URIs to identify things, so that people can point at your
stuff
– A URI identifies a concept.
– Example of a URI for the Rixensart
commune:http://vocab.belgif.be/refnis/25091#id
– In general, a URI is associated with a web page that documents the
concept. For Rixensart:
http://vocab.belgif.be/refnis/25091

12. Open Statistics – Resource description framework (RDF)
 In the RDF files, triplets of the type “subject-predicate-object” are stored
 In RDF files,
– subjects are URIs.
– predicats are URIs.
– objects are URIs ou des litéraux
 Example (nomenclature):
<http://vocab.belgif.be/refnis/25091#id>
<http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#prefLabel> "Rixensart"@fr .
 There are "standard vocabularies" (rules for forming triplets). Skos is one
of them.

13. Open Statistics – Resource description framework (RDF)
 It’s possible to use "prefixes" to "abbreviate" URIs in RDF files
 Example:
@prefix refnis: http://vocab.belgif.be/refnis/ .
@prefix skos: http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core# .
refnis:25091#id skos:prefLabel "Rixensart"@fr.
refnis:25091#id skos:broader refnis:25000#id.

14. Open Statistics – Resource description framework (RDF)
 Sample RDF file to describe a study(metadata):
– ddi:Study_1 a disco:Study.
– ddi:Study_1 dcterms:title "National Population and Housing Census, 1980"@en.
– ddi:Study_1 dcterms:identifier "ARG_1980_PHC_v01_A_IPUMS“ .
 This description uses the vocabulary « ddi-rdf » (disco):
– DDI-RDF is “A vocabulary for publishing metadata about data sets
(research and survey data) into the Web of Linked Data”
– Described here : http://rdf-vocabulary.ddialliance.org/discovery.html

15. Open Statistics – Resource description framework (RDF)
 RDF = forming triplets
 There are several syntaxes to form them
– turtle,
– N-triples,
– xml,
– …

16. Open Statistics – Linked Open Data (LOD)
Linked open-data (LOD)

17. Open Statistics – Linked Open Data (LOD)
 It’s possible to link several RDF sources. This is referred to as Linked
Open Data (LOD).
Examples of LOD sites on which to link :
– Dbpedia
– Wikidata
– Geonames
 A simple way to link to another DB is to re-use its URIs

18. Open Statistics – Linked Open Data (LOD)
 Example of LOD (nomenclature):
– @prefix refnis: http://vocab.belgif.be/refnis/ .
@prefix skos: http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core# .
refnis:25091#id skos:prefLabel "Rixensart"@fr.
refnis:25091#id skos:broader refnis:25000#id.
refnis:25091#id skos:exactMatch <http://sws.geonames.org/2787990>.
refnis:25091#id skos:exactMatch <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q630478> .

19. Open Statistics – Semantic web
Semantic web

20. Open Statistics – Semantic web
 All the " sujet-prédicat-objet " sentences of the different LODs
form a giant "knowledge graph" whose size increases rapidly

21. Open Statistics – Semantic web

22. Open Statistics – Ontologies for statisticians
Standard vocabularies

23. Open Statistics – Standard vocabularies
 Classifications
– SKOS: Classifications (nomenclatures)
– XKOS: SKOS extension (for NACE, …)
 Document a list of files (catalog)
– DCAT
– StatDCAT-AP
– GeoDCAT-AP

24. Open Statistics – Standard vocabularies
 Metadata:
– Dublin core
– DDI-RDF
 Data:
– RDF Data cube vocabulary

25. Open Statistics – Standard vocabularies
 Other interesting vocabularies recommended by Eurostat
– The Organization Ontology
– The PROV ontology
– Time Ontology in OWL
– Dublin Core
– ISA Core Vocabularies in RDF (Person, Public Organisation,
Business, Public Service, Location)
– Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets (VoID)

26. Open Statistics – Nomenclatures
 Some nomenclatures, "controlled vocabularies" & thesauri
recommended by Eurostat:INSPIRE code lists
– EuroVoc thesaurus
– Named Authority Lists (NAL)

27. Open Statistics – LOD IN THE NSIs
 Some NSIs already have LOD:
– Insee: Some code tables + legal population
– Istat
– ONS + Geoportal UK
– Census 2011 in Ireland

28. Open Statistics – RDF@Statbel
 What to publish as LOD?
 Priorities for publication as LOD:
– Nomenclatures (create URIs for NACEBEL, REFNIS, … +
create files that expose hierarchies, …)
– Catalog of the data (to let the ‘machines’ all over the world
know that our datasets are available in csv, …)
– Metadata
– A selection of datasets (For example: legal population of
municipalities)

29. Open Statistics – Questions

30. Open Statistics – Contact
 Check out our websites
 Explore our datasets
 Re-use our data
 and
 Contact us!
 For questions please contact :
statbel.opendata@economie.fgov.be
Lucia.Decuyper@economie.fgov.be
Youri.Baeyens@economie.fgov.be
 To find out more check:
http://statbel.fgov.be
https://bestat.statbel.fgov.be
http://statbel.fgov.be/opendata/
http://statbel.fgov.be/en/statistics/opendata/licence/
 Follow Statbel on Twitter