Resource of the Week: A Convenient Way to Browse OECD Statistics
Editor's note:
We are pleased to present a terrific site this week from Resource Shelf contributing editor, Stuart Basefsky, director of the Institute for Workplace Studies News Bureau, School of Industrial & Labor Relations, Cornell University.
The data warehouse approach preserves the decentralised nature of directorates' statistical activities, while makeing their data part of a coherent OECD-wide corporate system.
The data warehouse provides:
a single, common mechanism for rapid data location and extraction
a centralised system for access rights management
the means for data providers to decide what data should be share with
other users
separation of the production & dissemination environments for improved
performance and data integrity
the means to enable access for non-OECD users (via the internet)
a single repository with which analytical tools and publication processes
can be integrated
Note: Registration may be necessary.
A full-text User Guide (PDF; 4.4 MB) is available.
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What is the OECD? Shirl adds this description of from the Overview page:
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is a unique forum where the governments of 30 market democracies work together to address the economic, social and governance challenges of globalisation as well as to exploit its opportunities.
The Organisation provides a setting where governments can compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practice and co-ordinate domestic and international policies. It is a forum where peer pressure can act as a powerful incentive to improve policy and which produces internationally-agreed instruments, decisions and recommendations in areas where multilateral agreement is necessary for individual countries to make progress in a globalised economy. Non-members are invited to subscribe to these agreements and treaties.
Exchanges between OECD governments flow from information and analysis provided by a secretariat in Paris. The secretariat collects data, monitors trends, and analyses and forecasts economic developments. It also researches social changes or evolving patterns in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, taxation and more.
...
For more than 40 years, the OECD has been one of the world’s largest and most reliable sources of comparable statistical, economic and social data. OECD databases span areas as diverse as national accounts, economic indicators, trade, employment, migration, education, energy, health and the environment. Much of the research and analysis is published.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
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The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
