National Statistical Offices
What is a National Statistical Office?
There are many organisations in a country that can publish national statistics data. These include government departments, research institutes, health services, survey companies or international groups. All the statistics published by these creates what the OECD defines as the national statistical system:
The national statistical system (NSS) is the ensemble of statistical organisations and units within a country that jointly collect, process and disseminate official statistics on behalf of national government.
One organisation usually operates as the main hub for national statistical data in a country. These are known as National Statistical Offices (NSOs):
“the national statistical office is the leading statistical agency within a national statistical system”.
NSOs publish statistical data on topics like health, the economy, education and housing. People in the public and private sectors use this data to observe what is happening in the country and to plan ahead. There are NSOs in almost every country on earth. Nearly every country has one main NSO, but in some, such as the USA, the job is split across multiple organisations.
In some countries, NSOs are called national statistical “institutes” or “bureaus”, or other variations. But national statistical office is the term used by the United Nations Statistics Division. The UNSD also maintains a list of NSOs worldwide, along with country profiles of their national statistical systems.
How NSO data can be part of the open web
All NSOs publish statistical data about their country. But the quantity and quality of data varies greatly between them. This is very understandable as every country has different finances, resources and society.
However, there exist good practices and standards in open data publishing that every NSO, no matter the size of budget, can aim to achieve. We’re not saying every NSO needs to build large data platforms, but simple, achievable techniques exist which can really help users of data.
Open principles for data publishing are partly about following open standards and partly about thinking about how the data can best be designed for other people to be able to reuse.
The Office of National Statistics in the UK produced a set of principles for what this can practically mean. In these they outline a need to consider publishing information so that it performs well on other sites and services. This is similar in many ways to the use of the Claim Review format in the fact checking world. For statistics this might be about how well it displays in the Google dataset explorer or in search results. This wider theme of making data part of the web is a key component of making data available in ways that support the processes of fact checking. By making access easier to the data, always presenting it in context and designing systems with reuse at the core.
The ODI has also undertaken a range of work around the idea of data as infrastructure and has a short eLearning course What is open data? Both of these offer further useful guidance on this topic.
NSOs we use as examples
In the next section we describe different aspects of data publishing by NSOs and how they affect the fact checking process.
These examples do not represent all NSOs but are just a sample from the many that exist. We have selected them to highlight different data publishing approaches. The authors of this document are English-speaking, and we admit our own bias in mainly selecting NSOs that publish in English.
Also, we are looking at these NSOs purely from a data publishing lens. We are not judging their overall worth as national statistical offices. We acknowledge that some NSOs operate under very challenging environments with limited budgets.