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Good news: it looks like Pakistan Bureau of Statistics is launching a new website. Yay? < http://pbos.gov.pk >
Bad news: I see an inordinate amount of downloadable PDFs, which are also available on the old website. What's the point?
Bad news: I see an inordinate amount of downloadable PDFs, which are also available on the old website. What's the point?
Dearth of authentic relevant actionable data in Pakistan is like needle in a haystack situation, forget other issues like granularity, timeliness, coherence, standardization etc. And the data that IS available is difficult to access, and unnecessarily time consuming to use.
For starters, is there any more egregious and sneaky way to make life harder for anyone- even skimming through a dataset, forget analyzing- than to upload that data on a pdf? Yes, I can convert it to excel and spend hours organizing it but why?!
The private sector hasn't risen to the challenge either. I can think of maybe two players that offer subscription-based public dataset services in machine readable format. But the coverage itself is not sufficient.
http://opendata.com.pk has attempted to catalogue a variety of datasets from different sources on one platform but once again, a lot of their data is difficult to maneuver because of the formats available. And from the looks of it, they are still finding their footing...
So while the public and the private sector mulls over the importance and utlity in making more data widely available for researchers like me- at least- for the numbers that are out there, upload a worksheet.
Pdfs are for one-page resumes.
Pdfs are for one-page resumes.
