(Statistical) Information Wants to Be Free
Friday, 1 July 2005
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has announced that as of today, their online publications and tables are now free to download, instead of requiring an account and a per-download charge, as before.
Considering the breadth of statistics they’re involved in, this should be of significant benefit to the Australian people, as well as businesses. They publish everything from Price Indices to information about Internet use to tourism, crime, education and unemployment figures. Check out the popular statistics page to get an idea.
They’re also providing their own RSS feed for publications, so I can stop scraping the HTML. Anitra might think I’m nuts, but I don’t care; I’m excited. Thanks, ABS!
Now, if only they provided the stats in a machine-readable format, at stable (i.e., cool) URIs…
One Comment
tbelcher said:
Sunday, July 3 2005 at 4:19 AM