Keywords: API, CURL, Official Statistics
Webpages:
http://rdata.work/slides/nsoapi/ National Statistical Offices have started setting up web services to provide published information through data APIs. Even though international standards exist, e.g. SDMX, the majority of NSOs create their individual API and few use existing community standards.
nsoAPI is an attempt to create a single package with functions for each provider that convert a custom data format into an R standard time series format ready for analysis or further transformation.
(“Opendata Tables” 2015) lists tables that can be retrieved from SDMX (International Organizations, ABS: Australia, INEGI: Mexico, INSEE: France and ISTAT: Italy, NBB: Belgium), the pxweb package (PXNET2: Finland, SCB: Sweden) and the nsoAPI package (BEA: USA, CBS: the Netherlands, GENESIS: Germany, ONS: UK, SSB: Norway, STATAT: Austria, STATBANK: Denmark).
With the exception of France, large countries tend to set their own standards. The BEA (USA) and ONS (UK) require the user to create an ID that needs to be submitted with each request. GENESIS (Germany) require the user to pay 500 Euros per year (250 Euros for academic users) to access the API.
References “NsoApi Vignette.” 2015.
https://github.com/bowerth/nsoApi/blob/master/vignettes/nsoApi.md.
“Opendata Tables.” 2015.
https://www.gitbook.com/read/book/bowerth/opendata-tables.