Daniel Antal | CCSI Data Observatory

Data Observatory Labs

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 18:12:00 +0100

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc| Speaker notes: S
Zoom: Alt + Click️| Fullscreen: F

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal | Reprex

Music Eviota

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 11:13:00 +0200

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc| Speaker notes: S
Zoom: Alt + Click️| Fullscreen: F

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.)

Introduction 2. Our Approach 3. Main Features 4. Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting 5. Why are we developing it? 6. Is There a Film/TV Industry Version? 7. Questions

Introduction

Our approach

Main Features

Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting

Why Are We Developing Eviota for Music?

Is There A Film Industry Version?

Yes, it is coming! Ask for a demo on Email | Keybase | LinkedIn.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal | Reprex

Create Datasets that are Easy to Combine and Reuse

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 09:09:00 +0100

The latest Reprex R package, dataset was released today on the Comprehensive R Archive Network. It is a very early, conceptual package that will help make scientific achievements more open, governmental data easier to find, and store information that can be better combined.

Data interoperability is almost a buzzword, yet we see very few comprehensive, good solutions to apply it. Try to find information on open government portals or on big open science repositories—apart from a few good examples, most datasets are as disorganized as any PC’s hard disk that is collecting dust in a shed.

The dataset package aims to bring together the best practices of data semantics, data organization, and the use of standard metadata to make sure that whatever you store in a data table, it will be immediately available for data analysis, activation, or combination in any new database.

Ambitious? It is, and dataset 0.1.9 is a very experimental product. While our other packages are aimed at intermediate users with a clear use case in mind, dataset at this point is aimed at package developers. Casual or even heavy R users are unlikely to download it as a standalone product. Instead, dataset aims to be a stable developer basis for our existing products, rOpenGov packages, and many new uses.

Download dataset

The metadata aim of dataset it to add standardized metadata to r data.frames, tibbles, data.tables and other similar structured, tabular objects. The organization and semantic objectives are to bring the tidy data concept closer to the datacube model, which is the basis of all statistical data exchanges, and W3C standards, which foster machine-to-machine data communications on the traditional web APIs and the semantic web.

Makes data importing easier and less error-prone;
Leaves plenty of room for documentation automation, resulting in far better reusability and reproducibility;
The publication of results from R following the FAIR principles is far easier, making the work of the R user more findable, more accessible, more interoperable and more reusable by other users;
Makes the placement into relational databases, semantic web applications, archives, repositories possible without time-consuming and costly data wrangling (See From dataset To RDF).

The first official release offers little immediate benefits. However, if you are an R package developer, we can bring you a few steps nearer to releasing your data products in a way that conforms the FAIR metadata principles. We can make a few steps to streamline your data wrangling. Make integration with relational databases easier. To make a step towards the semantic web.

New Data Curators Wanted

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 11:46:00 +0100

A data curator is a contributor in our open collaboration who will be named as a co-creator of tidy, standardized, reusable, FAIR, datasets in his/her field of expertise. Our curators help us vocalize the needs of their domain, be it data-driven beekeeping, or detecting algorithmic biases of recommender systems, and evaluates if the data that we come up with is directly usable and actionable. A data curator is a similar co-author as a “contributor” to open source software or a co-author of a journal article.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @DigitalMusicObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials!

Table of Contents

Boost your career without a conflict of interest

Being a data curator does not mean a commercial affiliation with any observatory partners, it is an affiliation to jointly create intellectual property. All our data curators are identified by their ORCiD ideas and named as co-creators in the open science repositories where we make our data available.

We create CC0 data that can be used for commercial, academic, and policy purposes. However, we want to honor the intellectual investment into a shared intellectual property by

delaying the release (for remaining competitive in academic publishing, if our curator is using the data in new articles; or NGOs for their campaign)
creating hybrid assets for commercial users where some elements, particularly the ones that use their proprietary data, may not become open data.

FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable Digital Assets

Our observatories do not only work with open data.

We want to make data findable, interoperable (to be used in many applications), accessible, and eventually reusable (FAIR), but that does not mean that all data used must be free. Creating and especially regularly updating high-quality data assets requires plenty of intellectual and monetary investment.

We gladly add commercially available data to our observatory if we can share a large enough subset that our peer-reviewers can attest to the data’s high quality, usability, and actionability.

How to become a data curator?

Our handbook for curators a bit of a work in progress, but the onboarding process is clear. Do not worry if you do not use GitHub, it is not necessary, but we story and co-create our assets, including the curator’s handbook on this digital co-working place.

This is an open book that we co-create on GitHub, and if you find any roadblocks, you do not understand something, or have a better idea on how to illustrate or explain things, just make a for to this repo, improve it, add new photos, and send us a pull request. (You need an invite first for editing!)
Here is a starter repository on GitHub. Not mandatory, but if you use GitHub, start here.

In a nutshell:

Please read the entire covenant here.
We need a very brief biography. Name, affiliation, education details, one-line and short biography. Please, send back this bio_template.txt text file. If you know markdown, use this version. The files are identical, but your word processor may not know how to open an .md file.
Your ORCiD to resolve ambiguity with similarly named people. You may use different library or publication service IDs, such as Google Scholar, Publeon, etc, you may provide them, too, but we do need an ORCiD ID, because most of the EU open science infrastructure and the R ecosystem uses this one. If you do not have it, please create one—it only takes a few minutes. Please add it to the bio_template.txt.
Your LinkedIn ID, add it to the bio_template.txt.
You should follow our file naming conventions, and avoid the use of special characters in any file names at all times: , $, :,;,,,., ", ' tick or backtick.
You must send a ile picture that is at least 500px wide (jpg or png format.) It can be bigger, and preferably not a very “narrow” cut, as all avatars will be behind a circular mask (see other curators.)

Find inspiration from other contributors

Why data observatories?

Our data observatories (platform products) cover our R&D and platform costs while giving us access to an expanding range of prime clients. We use 21-st century open-source data engineering solutions, a decentralized data governance method, and web 3.0 technologies to avoid conflicts of interest and prevent the data Sisyphus of error-prone human data wrangling. There is little competition on this service level (there are about 60 UN/EU/OECD recognized data observatories, and almost all of them are managed by a different operator.) This layer is already monetized, and we have proven success. Our unique advantage is a combination of legal and technological skills: understanding legally open data, web 3.0, and data modeling, and the ability to participate in the open-source statistical /scientific software creator community.
We create open-source software applications that fuel our data observatories with unprocessed, open, linked data. We create software for the R statistical environment, which is used in both official statistics and in many business and academic organizations. The production of R software components is a competitive field, but we believe that our position is strong: the vast majority of R packages are lightly or not at all serviced because of the lack of financing.

Reprex produces open-source scientific software, and various collaborative data engineering infrastructures to get legally open governmental data and open science data in a timely, usable format to ecological researchers, and ecotech innovators.

We provide bespoke analytics solutions to our institutional partners in our data observatories. Such bespoke solutions iterate over our existing software components, helping us design better applications within an ever-expanding ecosystem. Providing tailored data-science services would require a large organization without a clear focus. We provide these services on an ad-hoc basis only among institutional partners and users of our data observatories. In these circles, which are often prime clients, we face little or no competition because we are trusted partners and data and solution providers. This is a key to our revenue and market growth.
We develop high-value software-as-service applications that leverage our data observatory assets and our software solution into a novel, commercially valuable uses. Our applications are built around our family of open-source software and generalize our bespoke analytics solutions. We are in a late prototype phase where we already have some revenue and are trying to prepare for scaling up at the correct price with three of our applications. All of our applications are entering into highly competitive market segments. We are building on our ‘unfair’ advantage that we are bundling our solutions with data that is not accessible to competitors, and we can test them in the protected ecosystems of our observatories.

Good to know

FAIR Principles: improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets.
DataCite: A persistent, standardized approach to access, identification, sharing, and re-use of datasets—this is our favored way of describing data for future use according to the FAIR principles. Many EU open science repositories will ask your publications with this documentation.
Biblatex is a standard text file used by citation engines, bibliography management tool, and in scientific publication templates. (See for example the Overleaf Biblatex tutorial.
Dublin Core is an older international standard than DataCite, but the two standards greatly overlap. Dublin Core was originally developed by libraries. You often may need to fill out Dublin Core properties for publication.

Watch Our 2-min Introduction

⚙️/ Subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan.

Vote Reprex :)

Go to Cast your vote for The Hague Innovators challenge 2022! and choose Reprex :)

Engage with us on LinkedIn @DigitalMusicObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials!

Listen Local Nederland

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 17:00:00 +0000

We will carry out the research outlined in our feasibility study within the [OpenMuse] project from 1 January 2023 in an open collaboration with cultural policymakers, the local music ecosystem, and open source developers. Our partner, MXF tries to put the findings into actionable data services in Lithuania and Ukraine with the help of MusicAire. We develop open tools that can be applied in Utrecht, the Hague, Budapest, Tallinn, Vilnius, Bratislava, or anywhere.

This is a past event. Check out our forthcoming events or write to Daniel Antal or to antaldaniel. Or send an email.

Our ongoing project since 2014 is Listen Local. We would like to find out how can a local music ecosystem, or a small scene avoid being colonized by global players on streaming platforms, radio, or in-store music. How can we make sure that music recommendations connect bands in Utrecht with fans in Utrecht? If a Polish band is visiting Utrecht, music lovers will find their show?

We are arriving at opening to Klein Berlijn at 17.00 where you can sit down with a coffee or a beer to chat. No reservation needed. At 19.30 we are getting on our OV fiets and cycle over to the Vechtclub where we will meet people of the local indie scene, Tiny Rooms, and see two independent bands on stage.

As the sales and promotion of recorded music get fully automated, and even the curation of music for live events gets more and more influenced by machine learning outcomes or social media metrics, how can a DIY label remain relevant? How you can run a small club or a label without having to invest in a multi-million euro data engineering team? Make sure that the algorithm will learn successfully your music offering.

‘I feel at home where people care’ Read Gabija’s interview and check out the band with us.

Reprex’s motto is big data for all. We want to fight data inequalities, data monopolies, and make big data and AI work for self-released artists or small labels, too.

Gabija and Daniel are visiting Utrecht to meet DIY musicians, labels, researchers, fans and friends to find new partners for our Listen Local projects. On an intellectual level, we are interested in trustworthy AI, data feminism, and providing a proper digital representation to music and live performances for all. On a more emotional level, we want to meet musicians and music lovers from the indie scene.

We want to help independent artists to find their next audience, and fans to find their next favorite record or a truly fulfilling live music experience. Gabija had a conversation with The Kurws in our Listen Local Interviews series. She asked the band about where they are coming from, where they want to go? Where they are local? And what they have to offer to the people who will join us on 31 October 2022 in Utrecht?

Check out our projects

Digital Music Observatory and Listen Local
Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory and short call for potential partners.
Make interviews, get interviewed, write blog posts, or syndicate our content to and from Data & Lyrics.
Don’t forget to vote for Reprex in the Hague Innovators Award competition 2022. The audience voting starts on 1 November 2022.
Download our submission for the competition.
Get in touch!

Please Choose Reprex in The Hague Innovators Award Online Vote

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 16:17:00 +0200

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials. 🇭🇺 magyarul

Table of Contents

How to vote?

Go to Cast your vote for The Hague Innovators challenge 2022!

Make sure you select Reprex and write in your email (it is safe here.) You need to tick `✅ I’m not a robot’ to be able to select companies.

Your vote is not final yet, you must click on a confirmation link to prove that it was you who voted. Go to your email. (Your email is only recorded to avoid double voting, they will not add your address to any marketing databases.)

Please make sure you chose Reprex and click on link to the confirmation your vote.

You receive a text that your code is recorded and you have nothing else to do. (Your address is safe with the municipality of The Hague.)

Thank you very much!

Please share our video message on YouTube among your colleagues and friends.

By pressing the ⚙️ and choosing subtitles you can choose your language. If you are there, please leave a 👍, too :)

The message is the message! We are an ethical data and AI company, and one of our topics is detecting if algorithms are biased towards the English language speakers. We want to teach the computer to understand small languages, and of course, everyone, who is under-represented in data: womxn, former colonial nations.

🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan.

2 Retweet our appeal from one of our observatory Twitter accounts. For cultural audiences:

🤎 We ask you, humbly, to support us with a vote or by sharing our appeal. We're part of the #opensource, #opendata, and #openscience movement that depends on your support to stay online and thriving, but many of our users simply look the other way🤦🏻‍♀️https://t.co/zdU2i0Jvvn
— Creative Cultural Data Observatory (@CultDataObs) November 1, 2022

The same message for music audiences: @DigitalMusicObs; for green audiences: @GreeDealObs.

Like our LinkedIn page and share our appeal.
Or just send the link to this post from the browser your colleagues and friends.

Why vote for us?

We are finalists in The Hague Innovation Awards with a product offering and a message that big data and AI should work for all: ethnic minorities, small nations, small languages, womxn. We are measuring why certain artists are not getting recommended and paid on global streaming platforms, or why NGOs do not find the right data about fighting greenwashing. We want to help small businesses, civil society organizations, and NGOs who cannot hire a data engineer and a data scientist to fight data monopolies. Who cannot defend themselves from the dark patterns of greedy algorithms?

Get in touch

Check out our events or write to Daniel Antal or to antaldaniel. Or send an email. Thank you!

Listen Local Nederland Meetup in Utrecht

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 16:17:00 +0200

‘I feel at home where people care’ Read Gabija’s interview and check out the band with us.

Reprex’s motto is big data for all. We want to fight data inequalities, data monopolies, and make big data and AI work for self-released artists or small labels, too.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

Check out our projects

Digital Music Observatory and Listen Local
Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory and short call for potential partners.
Make interviews, get interviewed, write blog posts, or syndicate our content to and from Data & Lyrics.
Don’t forget to vote for Reprex in the Hague Innovators Award competition 2022. The audience voting starts on 1 November 2022.
Download our submission for the competition.
Get in touch!

Surveyharmonization

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Survey Harmonization Workflow

Controls

Next: Right Arrow or Space
Previous: Left Arrow
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc | Speaker notes: S | Fullscreen: F

Principles

Generic concept of surveying, i.e. examining and record the area and features of (an area of land) to construct a map, plan, or description.
Structured data collection of the missing information, harmonization of knowledge.
Reproducibility and not automation. On a small scale, anything can be done with Ctrl C + Ctrl V. But it should be recorded, documented for future Ctrl C + Ctrl V.

Timeline

Concepts

We harmonize knowledge concepts. Because knowledge concepts are very abstract, the harmonization of concepts requires an iteration of desired output and questionnaire or form items, and it will be carried on throughout the project. The harmonization of concepts will allow us to link our survey data to pre-existing survey data, financial information, or any other source of information.

Data Model

Data modeling enables us to place the information we gain from existing sources, for example, by recycling pre-existing questionnaire items and answers to a knowledge graph together with our data. A knowledge graph is a more flexible, future-proof, generalized database that connects pre-existing information with new information.

Question Bank

The questionnaire harmonization includes the harmonization of the question or entry form label (In the past 12 months, how many times have you been to a concert) and the response scale (1, 2, Do not remember, Decline to say). The harmonization must be made with other knowledge concepts (i.e. the concept of the concert) and survey questionnaires or annual report information fields.

Translations

We must be able to work with translators and standardized translated labels. We must have the question bank ready by the end of October. Ensure that we do not use URIs but IRIs for identifying questionnaire items. Labesl are translated or localized. A generic ‘French’ label is often unsuitable for French speakers in Belgium.

Fieldwork

We must carry out fieldwork, i.e. surveying music-related problems. We will conduct the fieldwork with a cheap online tool (LimeSurvey or SurveyMonkey). The fieldwork will likely remain fully online or may contain a small, hybrid online interview element. The integration of fieldwork implementation is the least important task for us. Use whatever is convenient.

Code and Save

We must record the information into coded datasets that are saved into files. The success of the output harmonization will depend on the use of harmonized coding (we will use, whenever possible, SDMX code definitions, such as ‘F" = ‘female’) and the use of machine-readable, open, portable file formats. Potential users are small entities, and we will avoid the use of databases and favor the use of knowledge graphs instead.

Output harmonization

We will harmonize the data, which means that we will join the coded answers considering the question labels, the value labels, and various forms of missing information across all languages (i.e., English or German versions of a question and answer options.)

Presentation

We will report the harmonized information using graphic visualizations, tables placed into presentation slides, books or web pages. We should have the templates based on test data ready in January.

Questions?

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Digital Music Observatory

Parntership Proposal for Europeana & Network

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0000

We are competing for The Hague Innovators’ Award as an impact startup with the support letter of Europeana, trying to find alternative funding for our shared project (next slide.)
2-minute, popular 🖱️ explainer video with ⚙️/subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 🇵🇱 🇸🇪 + Catalan. (🙏🏻 share it).
Please 🙏🏿 vote for Reprex by clicking here, and if you like us, share the appeal from 🖱️ here on Twitter or LinkedIn, too.

Open Call for Collaboration on Cultural Heritage Data

Next >️ or Space| Previous <
Start Home | Finish End
Overview Esc | Fullscreen F
Zoom Alt + Click

The 🖱️ CCSI Data Observatory already has some data assets on Zenodo, and we can upgrade its API (both as Rest API with datacube and with a simple RDF serialization)
We are creating high quality, SDMX compatible, linkable, open science data about cultural heritage objects and other cultural heritage policy data. We would like to connect on knowledge graphs to actual content.
Revisit some modest deliverables of 🖱️ RECREO and seek new funding.

The 🖱️ CfR HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-01-03: Re-visiting the digitisation of cultural heritage: What, how and why?. Our appeal is to avoid duplication of cultural heritage and cultural industries digital infrastructure, and join forces with rights management, and commercial knowledge graphs to make heritage more reusable and valued.
🖱️ CfR HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-01-02: Cultural and creative industries for a sustainable climate transition. We have our open source software and app for environmental impact analysis and value chain analysis of the music industry that can be applied to the entire cultural sector.

Listen Local Feasibility Sutdy | Listen Local Judaica Demo

What are data observatories?

There are more than 60 functional, and about 20 already discontinued data observatories, i.e. long-term, usually triangular (business, academic, policy) data collection institutions recognized by the EU, OECD or UNESCO, including the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights of the EU or the European Audiovisual Observatory of the Council of Europe.

Do it Smarter

They usually do not exchange standard data with statistical agencies, they are not synchronized on knowledge graphs of the Europeana or national libraries, and their research output is usually not to be found on open science repositories.
The Hague is the winner of the World Smart City Award 2021, and we would like to attract the planned European Music Observatory and other, EU/UNESCO recognized institutions into the town building on the innovations of Reprex and the ecosystem of the Hague.

Strategic objectives

Develop our data observatories as Open Scholarly Infrastructure.
Place our Digital Music Observatory, Cultural and Creative Data Observatory, and Green Deal Data Observaotry on knowledge graphs of Europeana, Wikidata, and other open knowledge systems.
Harmonize research artefacts with open repositories such as Zenodo and Figshare.
Achieve EU/UNESCO/OECD recognition for our self-governing, triangular, science-policy-bushiness triangular data ecosystems as data observatories.

Possible Collaboration

Connect national collective management organization, national library, and various services (Spotify, YouTube) to make the national repertoire more visible
Create use statistics for cultural diversity policies and monitoring local content regulations
Provide best practice example and open source tools for replication
Support research automation

Web 3.0 & FAIR

FAIR metadata: Dublin Core & DataCite referential metadata
Integration to FigShare and Zenodo for automated releases and publications
Supported with optional, open source APIs to retrieve the data
Supported with RDF serialization

Dissemination Support

Support automated publishing and releasing of data, visualizations, newsletters, and long-form documentation in auto-refreshing websites, blogposts, or articles, or even books.
Develop an ecosystem of open source software that helps the professional collection, processing, documentation of data conforming the Data Governance Act, and supporting data sharing and data altruism.

Questions?

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Digital Music Observatory - Cultural Creative Sectors Industries

Slides

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Data Observatory 3.0

Controls

Next: Right Arrow or Space
Previous: Left Arrow
Start: Home
Finish: End
Overview: Esc
Speaker notes: S
Fullscreen: F
Zoom: Alt + Click
PDF Export: E

What are data observatories?

There are more than 60 functional, and about 20 already discontinued data observatories, i.e. long-term, usually triangular (business, academic, policy) data collection institutions recognized by the EU, OECD or UNESCO, including the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights of the EU or the European Audiovisual Observatory of the Council of Europe.

Do it Smarter

They usually do not exchange standard data with statistical agencies, they are not synchronized on knowledge graphs of the Europeana or national libraries, and their research output is usually not to be found on open science repositories.
The Hague is the winner of the World Smart City Award 2021, and we would like to attract the planned European Music Observatory and other, EU/UNESCO recognized institutions into the town building on the innovations of Reprex and the ecosystem of the Hague.

Strategic objectives

Develop our data observatories as Open Scholarly Infrastructure
Place our Digital Music Observtory, Cultural and Creative Data Observatory, and Green Deal Data Observaotry on knowledge graphs of Europeana, Wikidata, and other open knowledge sytems
Harmonize research artefacts with open repositories such as Zenodo and Figshare.
Achieve EU/UNESCO/OECD recognition for our self-governing, triangular, science-policy-busines triangular data ecosystems as data observatories

Digital Music Observatory

Listen Local in Horizon Europe OpenMuse WP Diversity, Creative Europe MusicAIRE: connected and curated data on 10,000s of music works
Our aim is to describe the entire, currently legally available music repertoire of Slovakia and Lithuania at first, and a large part of Ukraine.
Connected with name authorities, web services.

Possible Use Case

Connect national collective management organization, national library, and various services (Spotify, YouTube) to make the national repertoire more visible
Create use statistics for cultural diversity policies and monitoring local content regulations
Provide best practice example and open source tools for replication

Creative and Cultural Sectors Industries Data Observatory

Technical Features

Reprex | Documentation

FAIR

FAIR metadata: Dublin Core & DataCite referential metadata. Our dataset R software package is under review in rOpenSci and will be added to the rOpenGov ecosystem. It will greatly facilitate the automatic release of any research output from the R statistical system.
Integration to FigShare and Zenodo for automated releases and publications.

Web 3.0

supported with optional, open source APIs to retrieve the data
supported with RDF serialization

Dissemination Support

support automated publishing and releasing of data, visualizations, newsletters, and long-form documentation in auto-refreshing websites, blogposts, or articles, or even books.
develop an ecosystem of open source software that helps the professional collection, processing, documentation of data conforming the Data Governance Act, and supporting data sharing and data altruism.

Research Automation

Research automation

support research automation

Questions?

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Digital Music Observatory

Slides

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Data Observatory 3.0

Controls

Next: Right Arrow or Space
Previous: Left Arrow
Start: Home
Finish: End
Overview: Esc
Speaker notes: S
Fullscreen: F
Zoom: Alt + Click
PDF Export: E

What are data observatories?

There are more than 60 functional, and about 20 already discontinued data observatories, i.e. long-term, usually triangular (business, academic, policy) data collection institutions recognized by the EU, OECD or UNESCO, including the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights of the EU or the European Audiovisual Observatory of the Council of Europe.

Do it Smarter

They usually do not exchange standard data with statistical agencies, they are not synchronized on knowledge graphs of the Europeana or national libraries, and their research output is usually not to be found on open science repositories.
The Hague is the winner of the World Smart City Award 2021, and we would like to attract the planned European Music Observatory and other, EU/UNESCO recognized institutions into the town building on the innovations of Reprex and the ecosystem of the Hague.

Strategic objectives

Develop our data observatories as Open Scholarly Infrastructure
Place our Digital Music Observtory, Cultural and Creative Data Observatory, and Green Deal Data Observaotry on knowledge graphs of Europeana, Wikidata, and other open knowledge sytems
Harmonize research artefacts with open repositories such as Zenodo and Figshare.
Achieve EU/UNESCO/OECD recognition for our self-governing, triangular, science-policy-busines triangular data ecosystems as data observatories

Digital Music Observatory

Listen Local in Horizon Europe OpenMuse WP Diversity, Creative Europe MusicAIRE: connected and curated data on 10,000s of music works
Our aim is to describe the entire, currently legally available music repertoire of Slovakia and Lithuania at first, and a large part of Ukraine.
Connected with name authorities, web services.

Possible Collaboration

Connect national collective management organization, national library, and various services (Spotify, YouTube) to make the national repertoire more visible
Create use statistics for cultural diversity policies and monitoring local content regulations
Provide best practice example and open source tools for replication

Creative and Cultural Sectors Industries Data Observatory

Possible Collaboration

The CCSI Data Observatory already has some data assets on Zenodo, and we can upgrade its API (both as Rest API with datacube and with a simple RDF serialization)
Create use statistics for cultural heritage objects and other cultural heritage policy data
Revisit some modest deliverables of RECREO and seek new funding.

Green Deal Data Observatory

Possible Collaboration

The Green Deal Data Observatory is currently developed to provide free or very accessible environmental, social and governance reporting tools to the cultural sector.
It could also be used to provide ecological context to cultural heritage objects (CHO) for greater awareness.

Technical Features

Reprex | Documentation

FAIR

FAIR metadata: Dublin Core & DataCite referential metadata
Integration to FigShare and Zenodo for automated releases and publications

Web 3.0

supported with optional, open source APIs to retrieve the data
supported with RDF serialization

Dissemination Support

support automated publishing and releasing of data, visualizations, newsletters, and long-form documentation in auto-refreshing websites, blogposts, or articles, or even books.
develop an ecosystem of open source software that helps the professional collection, processing, documentation of data conforming the Data Governance Act, and supporting data sharing and data altruism.

Research Automation

Research automation

support research automation

Questions?

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Digital Music Observatory

stacodelists: use standard, language-independent variable codes to help international data interoperability and machine reuse in R

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 08:12:00 +0100

Visit the documentation website of statcodelists on statcodelists.dataobservatory.eu/.

The goal of statcodelists is to promote the reuse and exchange of statistical information and related metadata with making the internationally standardized SDMX code lists available for the R user. SDMX – the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange has been published as an ISO International Standard (ISO 17369). The metadata definitions, including the codelists are updated regularly according to the standard. The authoritative version of the code lists made available in this package is https://sdmx.org/?page_id=3215/.

Purpose

Cross-domain concepts in the SDMX framework describe concepts relevant to many, if not all, statistical domains. SDMX recommends using these concepts whenever feasible in SDMX structures and messages to promote the reuse and exchange of statistical information and related metadata between organisations.

Code lists are predefined sets of terms from which some statistical coded concepts take their values. SDMX cross-domain code lists are used to support cross-domain concepts. What are these cross-domain coded concepts?

Geographical codes, like NL: the Netherlands in the CL_AREA code list.
Standard industry codes J631 for Data processing, hosting and related activities in Europe. (NACE Rev 2 in Europe, beware, it is J592in Australia and New Zealand, see CL_ACTIVITY_ANZSIC06.)
Occupations, like OC2521 for Database designers and administrators in CL_OCCUPATIONS
Time fomatting standards, like CCYY for annual data series in CL_TIME_FORMAT.

Check out the available codlists on the package homepage.

The use of common code lists will help users to work even more efficiently, easing the maintenance of and reducing the need for mapping systems and interfaces delivering data and metadata to them. A very obvious advantage of using the code systems is that you can retrieve data from national sources indifferent of the natural language used in North Macedonia, Japan, the U.S. or the Netherlands. While the data labels may change to be locally human-readable, computers and geeks can read the codes and understand them immediately. Provided that they use the standard codes.

Our data observatories are rolling out SDMX coding across all datasets to help data ingestion and interoperability, data findability and data reuse. statcodelists can help the use of standard SDMX codes in your R workflow–both for downloading data from statistical agencies and to produce publication-ready datasets that the rest of the world (and even APIs) will understand.

Installation

You can install statcodelists from CRAN:

install.packages("statcodelists")

Further recommended code values for expressing general statistical concepts like not applicable, etc., can be found in section Generic codes of the Guidelines for the creation and management of SDMX Cross-Domain Code Lists.

For further codelists used by reliable statistical agency but not harmonized on SDMX level please consult the SDMX Global Registry Codelists page.

The creator of this package is not affiliated with SDMX, and this package was has not been endorsed by SDMX.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the statcodelists project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials!

links:

icon: twitter icon_pack: fab name: Follow url: https://twitter.com/CultDataObs/
icon: linkedin icon_pack: fab link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/80644612/
icon: fa-solid fa-code icon_pack: fas name: Code & Tutorials link: https://statcodelists.dataobservatory.eu/
icon: github icon_pack: fab name: Contributions, Feedback & Bug Reports link: https://github.com/antaldaniel/statcodelists/

Developing a software-as-service solution for micro-, and small enterprises

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 09:40:00 +0100

Engage with us on LinkedIn @DigitalMusicObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

The music sector must increase its environmental and social (ESG) sustainability management to meet the challenges of the climate emergency and to make the music sector a fairer, more just workplace for womxn and artists coming from minorities, small countries. The European Union will make target setting and audited reporting mandatory in environmental and social sustainability for large companies. The application of these new accounting, reporting and disclosure rules are optional for the music sector where almost all entities are micro-, or small enterprises and civil society organizations.

Even if music organizations are not pushed by regulators to adopt these new standards, it is in their best interest to take the initiative on the principle of subsidiarty, and develop tools that can be applied as an extension to their simplified financial and tax reporting. Music organizations and businesses that can prove that they are making progress in reducing their carbon footprint, making their water use more sustainable, and they provide equal opportunities for womxn, they will be eligible for new, green bank and insurance products (which are particularly important in live music) and can attract new sponsors and donors.

Compliance with these new rules is very costly, because tools are being developed for stock-exchange listed big companies and financial institutions. The Commission’s impact assessment (SWD/2021/150 final) estimates the cost of compliance with the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive exceeding 4 bn euros for the European companies or around 10,000 euros per company. Reprex, working together with large accounting, audit and value-based banking partners, scientific, research and industry partners in the Digital Music Observatory open knowledge collaboration, hopes to bring down this cost below 500 euros, which will immediately pay off when a music organization receives green money.

We are working on a simple interface that can connect the accounting system of micro and small enterprises with new methodologies, starting with greenhouse gas reporting with Reprex’s open source EEIO application iotables. We will keep many aspects of our software and data solution open, so that later methodological innovations and scientific achievements can be easily incorporated into the system. Reprex’s minimum viable product will be created in four iteration rounds in Malta, Czechia, Bulgaria and Belgium. However, our testing is open for any amount of donations to any music entities in the European Union who can provide input data in English or Dutch, or be able to pay for their translation and localization costs.

Link: Final List of Awareded Projects by MusicAIRE

Pan-European Creator Survey

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 14:00:00 +0100

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

The Cultural Creative Sectors Industries CCSI Data Observatory has grew out of the Digital Music Observatory, which had harmonized and collected surveys in all European countries about how musicians work and earn their living, and how audiences differ in various countries, metropolitan regions in terms of typical age, visiting probability, spending capacity, and other important factors. We helped music organizations to significantly increase the royalty pay-outs of artists in two countries, and we contributed for the advocacy of fairer compensation and fairer taxation in others.

This year we teamed up with the reCreating Europe research consortium of renowned experts in the field of copyright, geography and economics of creativity, sociology of innovation, communication and media studies, cultural policies, Open Knowledge and access to culture, cultural policies, minority rights and disability rights. We are carrying out a truly pan-European survey in all EU languages about important topics for creators and performers, including but not limited to musicians, songwriters, composers, photographers, video artists, designers, actors, illustrators, authors, directors, journalists and screenwriters:

Understanding how much creators are aware of the legal and financial terms that online platforms use that distribute their work
Understanding and interest in how AI algorithms contribute to the successful or not successful dissemination of their work, or can support their creative processes
Understanding and evaluation of fairness in the way internet platforms distribute earnings to creators
Attitudes to plagiarism, piracy, and copyright protection
Access to Covid-19 relief funds
No personal data is involved.

What do we ask from individual creators, bands, collectives?

The researchers of the reCreating Europe Consortium would like to carry out an interview with you in English.
If you cannot or do not want to be interviewed in English, we would be grateful if you would still fill out the survey form (about 10 minutes) in any of the EU official languages,
And invite a colleague/friend confident in English to do the same and volunteer for the interview at the end of the survey.

Creator organizations

We would like to ask you to ask your members to do the same above, in your newsletter, Facebook page, or other means of communication. The research with free datasets, visualizations, infographics will be placed for free in the Digital Music Observatory and the Cultural and Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory and can help your own HR, advocacy, education work. (We have many other similar data assets that are already there, or we can give to you.) Therefore, it is fully compliant with GDPR—we do not want to know who fills out our survey, the interviews are voluntary, and sharing the survey can contribute to your core business.

Bloggers

We would be very happy if you would write about this survey or invite creators to participate in our research. We can give you infographics, data visualizations prior to academic publication to write about the results.

In our Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020 as a case-study on evidence-based policymaking we compared how musicians and their audiences live in several countries.

Our research principles

We believe in transparency, openness, and high-quality work. We carry out an open collaboration with representatives of music professionals, NGOs, and universities. Because in the European music ecosystem, most professional and artists are freelancers or micro-entrepreneurs, we also try to form collaborations with individuals. All our data is open, interoperable, reusable data that comes with the highest quality of documentation and help for reuse.

We would appreciate it immensely if you would support this important research by disseminating the call to participate in this study.

History

Before you start a new questionnaire-based research, get in touch with us! Maybe we have history for your questionnaires. We can make your survey cheaper, better, and more informative.

The Digital Music Observatory and its predecessor, CEEMID, has been working with harmonized surveys for 8 years. We have compiled the biggest database of interview transcripts with concert audiences (more than 70,000 interviews in all European countries, soon to be extended to more than 100k) and the world’s biggest harmonized survey dataset about music creators (4000 responses from 12 European countries.) We use the Open Data Directive, originally for government-funded research data, recently extended to taxpayer funded scientific research, to access datasets that are invisible for the music industry.

We using survey harmonization and data integration techniques to join hundreds of questionnaire-based research in Europe on music audiences. We are now improving our capacities to bring analysis to sub-national level, like in the example of Wales.

What is Survey Harmonization?

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 13:00:00 +0100

In our Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020 as a case-study on evidence-based policymaking we compared how musicians and their audiences live in several countries.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

Survey harmonization is a powerful research tool to increase the usability of questionnaire-based empirical research. When the same questions are asked from similarly selected German and French people, music audiences and musicians, then we can make meaningful comparisons between the public opinions of the two countries, or the different perceptions of fans and makers of music. And if we repeat this procedure time after time, we can see if opinion is shifting more in Germany or France, or the living conditions of musicians are catching up with the rest of the country population.

You can create better surveys with less cost: you only need to ask the information, or change of information, that is not included in our harmonized datasets. Shorter, better questionnaires, smaller samples sizes, huge cost savings.
When you make questionnaire-based research, you immediately get a history (the same question asked years ago) and an international comparison (the same question asked in other countries.)
Often you do not even have to pay for the survey, because somebody else has already made a similar taxpayer funded research and we can just get the data for you. Harmonizing surveys requires advanced data science and statistics knowledge, which is what we provide with the scientific partners of the Cultural Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory. We have developed an open-source software, free to use, for this purpose. It is not for the faint heart – but users of our observatory can just leave their data for us and let us run the code.

How can you join this year’s survey?

Since 2020, a consortium of nine European universities led by Sant’Anna Pisa is working on the research project reCreating Europe funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. reCreating Europe aims at bringing a ground-breaking contribution to the understanding and management of copyright in the DSM, and at advancing the discussion on how IPRs can be best regulated to facilitate access to, consumption of and generation of cultural and creative products.

As a part of this project, the University of Amsterdam is conducting a survey which targets a wide range of creators and performers, including but not limited to musicians, songwriters, composers, photographers, video artists, designers, actors, illustrators, authors, directors, journalists and screenwriters.

Tpoics covered in the survey: (1) overall experiences with digitization of cultural content; (2) experiences with publishers, platforms and aggregators: contract and market power issues, accessibility, role of algorithms; (3) experiences with reversion clauses in copyright contracts (4) content removal and website blocking, role of algorithms in this; (5) income development over past years: total income, income from creative profession and distribution of sources within profession; impact of Covid and Covid-related support schemes (6) experiences with piracy and plagiarism; (7) competition from AI producing content.

The survey is available in all official EU languages.

We would appreciate it immensely if you would support this important research by disseminating the call to participate in this study.

History

Before you start a new questionnaire-based research, get in touch with us! Maybe we have history for your questionnaires. We can make your survey cheaper, better, and more informative.

Percentage of Regional Population Who Reads Books

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 19:00:00 +0100

The indicator is created from the Eurobarometer 79.2 survey’s GESIS datafile using regional subsamples. The regional subsamples were recoded to the NUTS 2016 regional boundary definitions with the regions R package. In the larger countries, where only NUTS1 level information was present (for example, in Germany and the United Kingdom), we imputed the NUTS1 territorial average values to the constituent NUTS2 regions.

We placed the authoritative copy with metadata on the Zenodo open repository.

A ‘dirty averaging’ was used to create regional averages, with scale national post-stratification weights to an expected value of 1. Al respondents who read at least one book in the previous 12 months were coded to have read a book.

This indicator was used in the Balázs Bodó, Dániel Antal, Zoltán Puha: Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia, in Plos ONE (Published: December 3, 2020.)

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

How We Add Value to Public Data With Better Curation And Documentation?

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 09:00:00 +0000

In this example, we show a simple indicator: the Turnover in Radio Broadcasting Enterprises in many European countries. This is an important demand driver in the Music economy pillar of our Digital Music Observatory, and important indicator in our more general Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory. We show a very similar example in our Green Deal Data Observatory with environmental R&D public spending in Europe.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

This dataset comes from a public datasource, the data warehouse of the European statistical agency, Eurostat. Yet it is not trivial to use: unless you are familiar with national accounts, you will not find this dataset on the Eurostat website.

The data can be retrieved from the Annual detailed enterprise statistics for services NACE Rev.2 H-N and S95 Eurostat folder.

Our version of this statistical indicator is documented following the FAIR principles: our data assets are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. While the Eurostat data warehouse partly fulfills these important data quality expectations, we can improve them significantly. And we can also improve the dataset, too, as we will show in the next blogpost.

Findable Data

Our data observatories add value by curating the data–we bring this indicator to light with a more descriptive name, and we place it in context with our Digital Music Observatory and Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory. While many people may need this dataset in the creative sectors, or among cultural policy designers, most of them have no training in working with national accounts, which imply decyphering national account data codes in records that measure economic activity at a national level. Our curated data observatories bring together many available data around important domains. Our Digital Music Observatory, for example, aims to form an ecosystem of music data users and producers.

We added descriptive metadata that help you find our data and match it with other relevant data sources.

We added descriptive metadata that help you find our data and match it with other relevant data sources. For example, we add keywords and standardized metadata identifiers from the Library of Congress Linked Data Services, probably the world’s largest standardized knowledge library description. This ensures that you can find relevant data around the same key term (radio broadcasting) in addition to our turnover data. This allows connecting our dataset unambiguosly with other information sources that use the same concept, but may be listed under different keywords, such as Radio–Broadcasting, or Radio industry and trade, or maybe Hörfunkveranstalter in German, or Emitiranje radijskog programa in Croatian or Actividades de radiodifusão in Portugese.

Accessible Data

Our data is accessible in two forms: in csv tabular format (which can be read with Excel, OpenOffice, Numbers, SPSS and many similar spreadsheet or statistical applications) and in JSON for automated importing into your databases. We can also provide our users with SQLite databases, which are fully functional, single user relational databases.

Tidy datasets are easy to manipulate, model and visualize, and have a specific structure: each variable is a column, each observation is a row, and each type of observational unit is a table. This makes the data easier to clean, and far more easier to use in a much wider range of applications than the original data we used. In theory, this is a simple objective, yet we find that even governmental statistical agencies–and even scientific publications–often publish untidy data. This poses a significant problem that implies productivity loses: tidying data will require long hours of investment, and if a reproducible workflow is not used, data integrity can also be compromised: chances are that the process of tidying will overwrite, delete, or omit a data or a label.

Tidy datasets are easy to manipulate, model and visualize, and have a specific structure: each variable is a column, each observation is a row, and each type of observational unit is a table.

While the original data source, the Eurostat data warehouse is accessible, too, we added value with bringing the data into a tidy format. Tidy data can immediately be imported into a statistical application like SPSS or STATA, or into your own database. It is immediately available for plotting in Excel, OpenOffice or Numbers.

Interoperability

Our data can be easily imported with, or joined with data from other internal or external sources.

All our indicators come with standardized descriptive metadata, and statistical (processing) metadata. See our API

All our indicators come with standardized descriptive metadata, following two important standards, the Dublin Core and DataCite–implementing not only the mandatory, but the recommended descriptions, too. This will make it far easier to connect the data with other data sources, e.g. turnover with the number of radio broadcasting enterprises or radio stations within specific territories.

Our passion for documentation standards and best practices goes much further: our data uses Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange standardized codebooks, unit descriptions and other statistical and administrative metadata.

Reuse

All our datasets come with standardized information about reusabililty. We add citation, attribution data, and licensing terms. Most of our datasets can be used without commercial restriction after acknowledging the source, but we sometimes work with less permissible data licenses.

In the case presented here, we added further value to encourage re-use. In addition to tidying, we significantly increased the usability of public data by handling missing cases. This is the subject of our next blogpost.

Are you a data user? Give us some feedback! Shall we do some further automatic data enhancements with our datasets? Document with different metadata? Link more information for business, policy, or academic use? Please give us any feedback!

How We Add Value to Public Data With Imputation and Forecasting

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0100

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

Public data sources are often plagued by missng values. Naively you may think that you can ignore them, but think twice: in most cases, missing data in a table is not missing information, but rather malformatted information. This approach of ignoring or dropping missing values will not be feasible or robust when you want to make a beautiful visualization, or use data in a business forecasting model, a machine learning (AI) applicaton, or a more complex scientific model. All of the above require complete datasets, and naively discarding missing data points amounts to an excessive waste of information. In this example we are continuing the example a not-so-easy to find public dataset.

In the previous blogpost we explained how we added value by documenting data following the FAIR principle and with the professional curatorial work of placing the data in context, and linking it to other information sources, such as other datasets, books, and publications, regardless of their natural language (i.e., whether these sources are described in English, German, Portugese or Croatian). Photo: Jack Sloop.

Completing missing datapoints requires statistical production information (why might the data be missing?) and data science knowhow (how to impute the missing value.) If you do not have a good statistician or data scientist in your team, you will need high-quality, complete datasets. This is what our automated data observatories provide.

Why is data missing?

International organizations offer many statistical products, but usually they are on an ‘as-is’ basis. For example, Eurostat is the world’s premiere statistical agency, but it has no right to overrule whatever data the member states of the European Union, and some other cooperating European countries give to them. And they cannot force these countries to hand over data if they fail to do so. As a result, there will be many data points that are missing, and often data points that have wrong (obsolete) descriptions or geographical dimensions. We will show the geographical aspect of the problem in a separate blogpost; for now, we only focus on missing data.

Some countries have only recently started providing data to the Eurostat umbrella organization, and it is likely that you will find few datapoints for North Macedonia or Bosnia-Herzegovina. Other countries provide data with some delay, and the last one or two years are missing. And there are gaps in some countries’ data, too.

See the authoritative copy of the dataset.

This is a headache if you want to use the data in some machine learning application or in a multiple or panel regression model. You can, of course, discard countries or years where you do not have full data coverage, but this approach usually wastes too much information–if you work with 12 years, and only one data point is available, you would be discarding an entire country’s 11-years’ worth of data. Another option is to estimate the values, or otherwise impute the missing data, when this is possible with reasonable precision. This is where things get tricky, and you will likely need a statistician or a data scientist onboard.

What can we improve?

Consider that the data is only missing from one year for a particular country, 2015. The naive solution would be to omit 2015 or the country at hand from the dataset. This is pretty destructive, because we know a lot about the radio market turnover in this country and in this year! But leaving 2015 blank will not look good on a chart, and will make your machine learning application or your regression model stop.

A statistician or a radio market expert will tell you that you know more-or-less the missing information: the total turnover was certainly not zero in that year. With some statistical or radio domain-specific knowledge you will use the 2014, or 2016 value, or a combination of the two and keep the country and year in the dataset.

Our improved dataset added backcasted (using the best time series model fitting the country’s actually present data), forecasted (again, using the best time series model), and approximated data (using linear approximation.) In a few cases, we add the last or next known value. To give a few quantiative indicators about our work:

Increased number of observations: 65%
Reduced missing values: -48.1%
Increased non-missing subset for regression or AI: +66.67%

If your organization is working with panel (longitudional multiple) regressions or various machine learning applications, then your team knows that not havint the +66.67% gain would be a deal-breaker in the choice of models and punctuality of estimates or KPIs or other quantiative products. And that they would spent about 90% of their data resources on achieving this +66.67% gain in usability.

If you happen to work in an NGO, a business unit or a research institute that does not employ data scientists, then it is likely that you can never achieve this improvement, and you have to give up on a number of quantitative tools or visualizations. If you have a data scientist onboard, that professional can use our work as a starting point.

Can you trust our data?

We believe that you can trust our data better than the original public source. We use statistical expertise to find out why data may be missing. Often, it is present in a wrong location (for example, the name of a region changed.)

If you are reluctant to use estimates, think about discarding known actual data from your forecast or visualization, because one data point is missing. How do you provide more accurate information? By hiding known actual data, because one point is missing, or by using all known data and an estimate?

Our codebooks and our API uses the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange documentation standards to clearly indicate which data is observed, which is missing, which is estimated, and of course, also how it is estimated. This example highlights another important aspect of data trustworthiness. If you have a better idea, you can replace them with a better estimate.

Our indicators come with standardized codebooks that do not only contain the descriptive metadata, but administrative metadata about the history of the indicator values. You will find very important information about the statistical method we used the fill in the data gaps, and even link the reliable, the peer-reviewed scientific, statistical software that made the calculations. For data scientists, we record the plenty of information about the computing environment, too-–this can come handy if your estimates need external authentication, or you suspect a bug.

Avoid the data Sisyphus

If you work in an academic institution, in an NGO or a consultancy, you can never be sure who downloaded the Annual detailed enterprise statistics for services (NACE Rev. 2 H-N and S95) Eurostat folder from Eurostat. Did they modify the dataset? Did they already make corrections with the missing data? What method did they use? To prevent many potential problems, you will likely download it again, and again, and again…

See our The Data Sisyphus blogpost.

We have a better solution. You can always rely on our API to import directly the latest, best data, but if you want to be sure, you can use our regular backups on Zenodo. Zenodo is an open science repository managed by CERN and supported by the European Union. On Zenodo, you can find an authoritative copy of our indicator (and its previous versions) with a digital object identifier, in this case, 10.5281/zenodo.5652118. These datasets will be preserved for decades, and nobody can manipulate them. You cannot accidentally overwrite them, and we have no backdoor access to modify them.

Reprex Joins RECREO Research Consortium To Develop Innovation Indicators

Sat, 06 Nov 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

The Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant’Anna and Università degli Studi di Trento (Italy); University of Glasgow (United Kingdom); Universiteit van Amsterdam and Stichting Europeana from the Netherlands; the National University of Ireland Maynooth (Ireland); Tartu Ulikool (Estonia); Szegedi Tudományegyetem (Hungary); Fundacion Santa Maria La Real del Patrimonio Historico from Spain; the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, (Belgium); Culture Action Europe AISBL and IDEA Strategische Economische Consulting (Belgium) and Reprex created the REshaping CCSI REsearch: Open data, policy analysis and methods for evidence-based decision-making consortium consortium, which will mainly develop new policy evidence in the field of innovation and inclusiveness for the creative and cultural sectors, industries. The Consortium applies for a Horizon Europe grant with the HORIZON-CL2-2021-HERITAGE-01-03 Cultural and creative industries as a driver of innovation and competitiveness call of the European Commission.

Policymakers face challenges when trying to implement a strict evidence-based approach to decision-making in the field of cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI). This is mostly due to four phenomena:

Evidence dissonances in mapping, measuring and analysis of key indicators, which lead to improper generalizations and gaps in decisionmakers’ knowledge and stakeholders’ awareness
Fragmentation of hubs of production and concentration of platforms, which create statistical biases and have features that hardly fit with traditional impact assessment methods;
Datafication, which is revolutionizing CCSI but remains difficult to investigate, thus broadening knowledge gaps; and
Stakeholders’ fragmentation and conflicting interests, which hinders their engagement, awareness-raising and uptake of policy inputs.With its cross-disciplinary consortium of academics, practitioners and a strong network of stakeholders, engaged via participatory research strategies, RECREO will help policymakers and stakeholders tackling such challenges, by generating new knowledge and methods to fill in knowledge and awareness gaps. RECREO will achieve this goal through four actions.

First, it will generate a wide array of horizontal and sector-specific datasets, made openly accessible via the CCSI Data Observatory and the Evidence Synthesis Platform. Second, it will offer an unprecedented EU and comparative mapping and impact assessment of key regulatory and policy measures relevant for CCSI, made available on the Law and Policy Observatory. Third, it will develop innovative methods to measure and assess CCSI innovation, competitiveness and spill-over effects, emphasizing inclusiveness, diversity and sustainability. Last, it will offer policy recommendations and best practices aimed at supporting the sustainable growth and competitiveness of culturally diverse CCSI, and their cross-fertilization with cultural heritage promotion and preservation.

Digital Music Observatory on MaMA 2021

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 12:15:00 +0000

Use Cases

Public advocacy reports, scientific uses

Use Cases 2

Business Confidential Reports with Digital Music Observatory

Damage claims in private copying
Royalty setting for restaurants, hotels, broadcasting
Music streaming market indicators
Evidence for competition law / regulatory affairs

Questions?

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Digital Music Observatory

Open Data - The New Gold Without the Rush

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 12:15:00 +0000

Use Cases

Public advocacy reports, scientific uses

Use Cases 2

Business Confidential Reports with Digital Music Observatory

Damage claims in private copying
Royalty setting for restaurants, hotels, broadcasting
Music streaming market indicators
Evidence for competition law / regulatory affairs

Questions?

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Digital Music Observatory

The Data Sisyphus

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Sisyphus was punished by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. This is the price that project managers and analysts pay for the inadequate documentation of their data assets.

When was a file downloaded from the internet? What happened with it sense? Are their updates? Did the bibliographical reference was made for quotations? Missing values imputed? Currency translated? Who knows about it – who created a dataset, who contributed to it? Which is an intermediate format of a spreadsheet file, and which is the final, checked, approved by a senior manager?

Big data creates inequality and injustice. On aspect of this inequality is the cost of data processing and documentation – a greatly underestimated, and usually not reported cost item. In small organizations, where there are no separate data science and data engineering roles, data is usually supposed to be processed and documented by (junior) analysts or researchers. This a very important source of the gap between Big Tech and them: the data usually ends up very expensive, ill-formatted, not readable by computers that use machine learning and AI. Usually the documentation steps are completely omitted.

“Data is potential information, analogous to potential energy: work is required to release it.” – Jeffrey Pomerantz

Metadata, which is information about the history of the data, and information how it can be technically and legally reused, has a hidden cost. Cheap or low-quality external data comes with poor or no metadata, and small organizations lack the resources to add high-quality metadata to their datasets. However, this only perpetuates the problem.

The hidden cost item behind the unbillable hours

As we have shown with our research partners, such metadata problems are not unique to data analysis. Independent artists and small labels are suffering on music or book sales platforms, because their copyrighted content is not well documented. If you automatically document tens of thousands of songs or datasets, the documentation cost is very small per item. If you, do it manually, the cost may be higher than the expected revenue from the song, or the total cost of the dataset itself. (See our research consortiums’ preprint paper: Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies)

In the short run, small consultancies, NGOs, or as a matter of fact, musicians, seem to logically give up on high-quality documentation and logging. In the long run, this has two devastating consequences: computers, such as machine learning algorithms cannot read their documents, data, songs. And as memory fades, the ill-documented resources need to be re-created, re-checked, reformatted. Often, they are even hard to find on your internal server or laptop archive.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

Metadata is a hidden destroyer of the competitiveness of corporate or academic research, or independent content management. It never quoted on external data vendor invoices, it is not planned as a cost item, because metadata, the description of a dataset, a document, a presentation, or song, is meaningless without the resource that it describes. You never buy metadata. But if your dataset comes without proper metadata documentation, you are bound, like Sisyphus, to search for it, to re-arrange it, to check its currency units, its digits, its formatting. Data analysts are reported to spend about 80% of their working hours on data processing and not data analysis – partly, because data processing is a very laborious task that can be done by computers at a scale far cheaper, and partly because they do not know if the person who sat before them at the same desk has already performed these tasks, or if the person responsible for quality control checked for errors.

Uncut diamonds need to be cut, polished, and you have to make sure that they come from a legal source. Data is similar: it needs to be tidied up, checked and documented before use. Photo: Dave Fischer.

Undocumented data is hardly informative – it may be a page in a book, a file in an obsolete file format on a governmental server, an Excel sheet that you do not remember to have checked for updates. Most data are useless, because we do not know how it can inform us, or we do not know if we can trust it. The processing can be a daunting task, not to mention the most boring and often neglected documentation duties after the dataset is final and pronounced error-free by the person in charge of quality control.

Our observatory automatically processes and documents the data

The good news about documentation and data validation costs is that they can be shared. If many users need GDP/capita data from all over the world in euros, then it is enough if only one entity, a data observatory, collects all GDP and population data expresed in dollars, korunas, and euros, and makes sure that the latest data is correctly translated to euros, and then correctly divided by the latest population figures. These task are error-prone,and should not be repeaeted by every data journalist, NGO employee, PhD student or junior analyst. This is one of the services of our data observatory.

The tidy data format means that the data has a uniform and clear data structure and semantics, therefore it can be automatically validated for many common errors and can be automatically documented by either our software or any other professional data science application. It is not as strict as the schema for a relational database, but it is strict enough to make, among other things, importing into a database easy.
The descriptive metadata contains information on how to find the data, access the data, join it with other data (interoperability) and use it, and reuse it, even years from now. Among others, it contains file format information and intellectual property rights information.
The processing metadata makes the data usable in strictly regulated professional environments, such as in public administration, law firms, investment consultancies, or in scientific research. We give you the entire processing history of the data, which makes peer-review or external audit much easier and cheaper.
The authoritative copy is held at an independent repository, it has a globally unique identifier that protects you from accidental data loss, mixing up with unfinished an untested version.

Cutting the dataset to a format with clear semantics and documenting it with the FAIR metadata concep exponentially increases the value of data. It can be publisehd or sold at a premium. Photo: Andere Andre.

While humans are much better at analysing the information and human agency is required for trustworthy AI, computers are much better at processing and documenting data. We apply to important concepts to our data service: we always process the data to the tidy format, we create an authoritative copy, and we always automatically add descriptive and processing metadata.

The value of metadata

Metadata is often more valuable and more costly to make than the data itself, yet it remains an elusive concept for senior or financial management. Metadata is information about how to correctly use the data and has no value without the data itself. Data acquisition, such as buying from a data vendor, or paying an opinion polling company, or external data consultants appears among the material costs, but metadata is never sold alone, and you do not see its cost.

In most cases, the reason why there is no gold rush for open data is that fact that while the EU member states release billions of euros’ worth data for free, or at very low cost, annually, it comes without proper metadata.

Data-as-Service

Reusable, legal, easy-to-import, interoperable, always fresh data in tidy formats with a modern API. Photo: Edgar Soto.

If the data source is cheap or has a low quality, you do not even get it. If you do not have it, it will show up as a human resource cost in research (when your analysist or junior researcher are spending countless hours to find out the missing metadata information on the correct use of the data) or in sales costs (when you try to reuse a research, consulting or legal product and you have comb through your archive and retest elements again and again.)

The data, together with the descriptive and administrative metadata, and links to the use license and the authoritative copy can be found in our API. Try it out!

Open Data - The New Gold Without the Rush

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

If open data is the new gold, why even those who release fail to reuse it? We created an open collaboration of data curators and open-source developers to dig into novel open data sources and/or increase the usability of existing ones. We transform reproducible research software into research- as-service.

Every year, the EU announces that billions and billions of data are now “open” again, but this is not gold. At least not in the form of nicely minted gold coins, but in gold dust and nuggets found in the muddy banks of chilly rivers. There is no rush for it, because panning out its value requires a lot of hours of hard work. Our goal is to automate this work to make open data usable at scale, even in trustworthy AI solutions.

There is no rush for it, because panning out its value requires a lot of hours of hard work. Our goal is to automate this work to make open data usable at scale, even in trustworthy AI solutions.

Most open data is not public, it is not downloadable from the Internet – in the EU parlance, “open” only means a legal entitlement to get access to it. And even in the rare cases when data is open and public, often it is mired by data quality issues. We are working on the prototypes of a data-as-service and research-as-service built with open-source statistical software that taps into various and often neglected open data sources.

We are in the prototype phase in June and our intentions are to have a well-functioning service by the time of the conference, because we are working only with open-source software elements; our technological readiness level is already very high. The novelty of our process is that we are trying to further develop and integrate a few open-source technology items into technologically and financially sustainable data-as-service and even research-as-service solutions.

Our review of about 80 EU, UN and OECD data observatories reveals that most of them do not use these organizations’s open data - instead they use various, and often not well processed proprietary sources.

We are taking a new and modern approach to the data observatory concept, and modernizing it with the application of 21st century data and metadata standards, the new results of reproducible research and data science. Various UN and OECD bodies, and particularly the European Union support or maintain more than 60 data observatories, or permanent data collection and dissemination points, but even these do not use these organizations and their members open data. We are building open-source data observatories, which run open-source statistical software that automatically processes and documents reusable public sector data (from public transport, meteorology, tax offices, taxpayer funded satellite systems, etc.) and reusable scientific data (from EU taxpayer funded research) into new, high quality statistical indicators.

We are taking a new and modern approach to the ‘data observatory’ concept, and modernizing it with the application of 21st century data and metadata standards, the new results of reproducible research and data science

We are building various open-source data collection tools in R and Python to bring up data from big data APIs and legally open, but not public, and not well served data sources. For example, we are working on capturing representative data from the Spotify API or creating harmonized datasets from the Eurobarometer and Afrobarometer survey programs.
Open data is usually not public; whatever is legally accessible is usually not ready to use for commercial or scientific purposes. In Europe, almost all taxpayer funded data is legally open for reuse, but it is usually stored in heterogeneous formats, processed into an original government or scientific need, and with various and low documentation standards. Our expert data curators are looking for new data sources that should be (re-) processed and re-documented to be usable for a wider community. We would like to introduce our service flow, which touches upon many important aspects of data scientist, data engineer and data curatorial work.
We believe that even such generally trusted data sources as Eurostat often need to be reprocessed, because various legal and political constraints do not allow the common European statistical services to provide optimal quality data – for example, on the regional and city levels.
With rOpenGov and other partners, we are creating open-source statistical software in R to re-process these heterogenous and low-quality data into tidy statistical indicators to automatically validate and document it.
We are carefully documenting and releasing administrative, processing, and descriptive metadata, following international metadata standards, to make our data easy to find and easy to use for data analysts.
We are automatically creating depositions and authoritative copies marked with an individual digital object identifier (DOI) to maintain data integrity.
We are building simple databases and supporting APIs that release the data without restrictions, in a tidy format that is easy to join with other data, or easy to join into databases, together with standardized metadata.
We maintain observatory websites (see: Digital Music Observatory, Green Deal Data Observatory, Economy Data Observatory) where not only the data is available, but we provide tutorials and use cases to make it easier to use them. Our mission is to show a modern, 21st century reimagination of the data observatory concept developed and supported by the UN, EU and OECD, and we want to show that modern reproducible research and open data could make the existing 60 data observatories and the planned new ones grow faster into data ecosystems.

We are working around the open collaboration concept, which is well-known in open source software development and reproducible science, but we try to make this agile project management methodology more inclusive, and include data curators, and various institutional partners into this approach. Based around our early-stage startup, Reprex, and the open-source developer community rOpenGov, we are working together with other developers, data scientists, and domain specific data experts in climate change and mitigation, antitrust and innovation policies, and various aspects of the music and film industry.

Our open collaboration is truly open: new data curators,developers and service designers, even volunteers and citizen scientists are welcome to join.

Our open collaboration is truly open: new data curators, data scientists and data engineers are welcome to join. We develop open-source software in an agile way, so you can join in with an intermediate programming skill to build unit tests or add new functionality, and if you are a beginner, you can start with documentation and testing our tutorials. For business, policy, and scientific data analysts, we provide unexploited, exciting new datasets. Advanced developers can join our development team: the statistical data creation is mainly made in the R language, and the service infrastructure in Python and Go components.

Analyze Locally, Act Globally: New regions R Package Release

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 12:00:00 +0000

The new version of our rOpenGov R package regions was released today on CRAN. This package is one of the engines of our experimental open data-as-service Green Deal Data Observatory, Economy Data Observatory, Digital Music Observatory prototypes, which aim to place open data packages into open-source applications.

In international comparison the use of nationally aggregated indicators often have many disadvantages: they inhibit very different levels of homogeneity, and data is often very limited in number of observations for a cross-sectional analysis. When comparing European countries, a few missing cases can limit the cross-section of countries to around 20 cases which disallows the use of many analytical methods. Working with sub-national statistics has many advantages: the similarity of the aggregation level and high number of observations can allow more precise control of model parameters and errors, and the number of observations grows from 20 to 200-300.

The change from national to sub-national level comes with a huge data processing price: internal administrative boundaries, their names, codes codes change very frequently.

Yet the change from national to sub-national level comes with a huge data processing price. While national boundaries are relatively stable, with only a handful of changes in each recent decade. The change of national boundaries requires a more-or-less global consensus. But states are free to change their internal administrative boundaries, and they do it with large frequency. This means that the names, identification codes and boundary definitions of sub-national regions change very frequently. Joining data from different sources and different years can be very difficult.

Our regions R package helps the data processing, validation and imputation of sub-national, regional datasets and their coding.

There are numerous advantages of switching from a national level of the analysis to a sub-national level comes with a huge price in data processing, validation and imputation, and the regions package aims to help this process.

You can review the problem, and the code that created the two map comparisons, in the Maping Regional Data, Maping Metadata Problems vignette article of the package. A more detailed problem description can be found in Working With Regional, Sub-National Statistical Products.

This package is an offspring of the eurostat package on rOpenGov. It started as a tool to validate and re-code regional Eurostat statistics, but it aims to be a general solution for all sub-national statistics. It will be developed parallel with other rOpenGov packages.

Get the Package

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("rOpenGov/regions")

or the released version from CRAN:

install.packages("regions")

You can review the complete package documentation on regions.dataobservaotry.eu. If you find any problems with the code, please raise an issue on Github. Pull requests are welcome if you agree with the Contributor Code of Conduct

If you use regions in your work, please cite the package as: Daniel Antal. (2021, June 16). regions (Version 0.1.7). CRAN. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4965909

Download the BibLaTeX entry.

Join us

Join our open collaboration Green Deal Data Observatory team as a data curator, developer or business developer. More interested in antitrust, innovation policy or economic impact analysis? Try our Economy Data Observatory team! Or your interest lies more in data governance, trustworthy AI and other digital market problems? Check out our Digital Music Observatory team!

Join Copernicus Climate Data Store Data with Socio-Economic and Opinion Poll Data

Sun, 06 Jun 2021 10:00:00 +0000

In this series of blogposts we will show how to collect environmental data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Data Store, and bring it to a data format that you can join with Eurostat’s socio-economic and environmental data. We have shown in a previous blogpost how to connect this to survey (opinion poll) and tax data, and a real policy problem in Belgium. We will create now subsequent tutorials to do more!

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

But first, why are we doing this? The European Union and its members states are releasing every year more and more data for open re-use since 2003, yet these are often not used in the EU’s data dissemination projects (the observatories) or in EU-funded research. We believe that there are many reasons behind this. Whilst more and more people can conduct business, scientific or policy analysis programmatically or with statistical software, knowledge how to systematically collect the data from the exponentially growing availability is not everybody’s specialty. And the lack of documentation, and high re-processing and validation need for open data is another drawback.

rOpenGov has long been producing high-quality, peer-reviewed R packages to work with open data, but their use is not for all. In an open collaboration, where you can join, too, rOpenGov teamed up with open source developers, knowledgeable data curators, and a service developer team lead by the Dutch reproducible research start-up Reprex to create a sustainable infrastructure that is permanently collecting, processing, documenting and visualizing open data. What we do is that we access open data (that is not always available for direct download) and re-process it to usable data that is tidy to be integrated with your existing data or databases. We are competing for the EU Datathon Challenge 1: supporting a European Green Deal agenda with open data as a service, and research as a servcie, and you are more than welcome to join our effort as a developer, a data curator, or as an occasional contributor to open government packages.

Register to the Copernicus Climate Data Store

Koen Hufkens, Reto Stauffer and Elio Campitelli created the ecmwfr R package for programmatically accessing the Copernicus Data Store service. Follow the CDS Functionality vignette to get started.

You will need to create a Register yourself for CDS services after accepting the Terms and conditions.

wf_set_key(user: "12345", 
           key: "00000000-aaaa-b1b1-0000-a1a1a1a1a1a1", 
           service: "cds")

You can check if you were successful with:

ecmwfr::wf_get_key(user: "12345", service: "cds")

Get the Data

Let us formulate our first request:

request_lai_hv_2019_06 <- list(
  "dataset_short_name": "reanalysis-era5-land-monthly-means",
  "product_type"  : "monthly_averaged_reanalysis",
  "variable"      : "leaf_area_index_high_vegetation",
  "year"          : "2019",
  "month"         :  "06",
  "time"          : "00:00",
  "area"          : "70/-20/30/60",
  "format"        : "netcdf",
  "target"        : "demo_file.nc")

lai_hv_2019_06.nc  <- wf_request(user: "<your_ID>",
                     request: request_lai_hv_2019_06 ,
                     transfer: TRUE,
                     path: "data-raw",
                     verbose: FALSE)

Effective Leaf Area Index

You can find this data either in global computer raster images, or in re-processed monthly averages. Working with the raw data is not very practical – in case of cloudy weather you have missing data, and the files are extremely huge for a personal computer. For the purposes of our Green Deal Data Observatory the monthly average values are far more practical, which are called monthly_averaged_reanalysis product types.

For compatibility with other R packages, convert the data with the from raster package from rSpatial.org.

lai_file <- here::here( "data-raw", "demo_file.nc")
lai_raster <- raster::raster(lai_file)

## Loading required namespace: ncdf4

Let us convert this to a SpatialDataPointsDataFrame class, which is an augmented data frame class with coordinates.

LAI_df <- raster::rasterToPoints(lai_raster, fun=NULL, spatial=TRUE)

Get The Map

With the help fo rOpenGov, we are creating various R packages to programmatically access open data and put them into the right format. The popular eurostat package is not only useful to download data from Eurostat, but also to map it.

In this case, we want to create regional maps. Europe has five levels of geographical regions: NUTS0 for countries, NUTS1 for larger areas like states, provinces; NUTS2 for smaller areas like countries, NUTS3 for even smaller areas. The LAU level contains settlemens and their surrounding areas.

Country borders change sometimes (think about the unification of Germany, or the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), but they are relatively stable entities. Sub-national regional border change very-very frequently – since 2000 there were many thousand changes in Europe. This means that you must choose one regional boundary definition. The latest edition is NUTS2021 but most of the data available is still in the NUTS2016 format, and often you will find NUTS2013 or even NUTS2010 data around. Our Green Deal Data Observatory uses the NUTS2016 definition, because it is far the most used in 2021. An offspring of the eurostat package, regions helps you take care of NUTS changes when you work, and can convert your data to NUTS2021 if you later need it.

## sf at resolution 1:60 read from local file

## Warning in eurostat::get_eurostat_geospatial(resolution: "60", nuts_level =
## "2", : Default of 'make_valid' for 'output_class="sf"' will be changed in the
## future (see function details).

plot(map_nuts_2)

Our measurement of the average Effective Leaf Area Index is a raster data, it is given for many points of Europe’s map. What we need to do is to overlay this raster information of the statistical map of Europe. We use the excellent sp: R Classes and Methods for Spatial Data package for this purpose. The sp::over() function decides if a point of Leaf Area Index measurement falls into the polygon (shape) of a particular NUTS2 regions, for example, Zuid-Holland or South Holland in the Netherlands, or Saarland in Germany, or not. Then it averages with the mean() function those measurements falling in the area.

LAI_nuts_2: sp::over(sp::geometry(
  as(map_nuts_2, 'Spatial')), 
  LAI_df,
  fn=mean)

Let’s call the average LAI index lai, and bind it to the Eurostat map:

names(LAI_nuts_2)[1] <- "lai"
LAI_sfdf <- bind_cols ( map_nuts_2, LAI_nuts_2 )

If you want to work with the data in a numeric context, you do not need the geographical information, and you can “downgrade” the SpatialDataPointsDataFrame to a simple data frame.

set.seed(2019) #to always see the same sample
LAI_sfdf %>%
  as.data.frame() %>%
  select ( all_of(c("NUTS_NAME", "NUTS_ID", "lai")) ) %>%
  sample_n(10)

##                      NUTS_NAME NUTS_ID lai
## 281                       Vest    RO42  NA
## 125                     Kassel    DE73  NA
## 69              Friesland (NL)    NL12  NA
## 237 Agri, Kars, Igdir, Ardahan    TRA2  NA
## 273                East Anglia    UKH1  NA
## 119                Prov. Liège    BE33  NA
## 61                   Bourgogne    FRC1  NA
## 275                      Essex    UKH3  NA
## 282                   Istanbul    TR10  NA
## 174                    Leipzig    DED5  NA

We’ll plot the map with ggplot2.

library(ggplot2)
library(sf)
ggplot(data=LAI_sfdf) + 
  geom_sf(aes(fill=lai),
          color="dim grey", size=.1) + 
  scale_fill_gradient( low ="#FAE000", high: "#00843A") +
  guides(fill: guide_legend(reverse=T, title: "LAI")) +
  labs(title="Leaf Area Index",
       subtitle: "High vegetation half, NUTS2 regional avareage values",
       caption="\ua9 EuroGeographics for the administrative boundaries 
                \ua9 Copernicus Data Service, June 2019 average values
                Tutorial and ready-to-use data on greendeal.dataobservatory.eu") +
  theme_light() + theme(legend.position=c(.88,.78)) +
  coord_sf(xlim=c(-22,48), ylim=c(34,70))

Data Integrity

Our Green Deal Data Observatory has a data API where we place the new data with metadata for programmatic download in CSV, JSON or even with SQL queries. For data integrity purposes, we are placing an authoritative copy on Zenodo (Green Deal Data Observatory Community). You can use this for scientific citations. We are also happy if you place your own climate policy related research data here, so that we can include it in our observatory. In our subsequent tutorials, we will show how to do this programmatically in R. This particular dataset (not only with the month June, which we selected to streamline the tutorial) is available here with the digital object identifier doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4903940.

Join us

Data API

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Our observatory has a new data API which allows access to our daily refreshing open data. You can access the API via api.economy.dataobservatory.eu (apologies for the ugly, temporary subdomain masking!).

All the data and the metadata are available as open data, without database use restrictions, under the ODbL license. However, the metadata contents are not finalized yet. We are currently working on a solution that applies the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, and fulfills the mandatory requirements of the Dublic Core metadata standards and at the same time the mandatory requirements, and most of the recommended requirements of DataCite. These changes will be effective before 1 July 2021.

The Competition Data Observatory temporarily shares an API with the Economy Data Observatory, which serves as an incubator for similar economy-oriented reproducible research resources.

Indicator table

The indicator table contains the actual values, and the various estimated/imputed values of the indicator, clearly marking missing values, too.

api.economy.dataobservatory.eu: indicator retrieval

You can get the data in CSV or json format, or write SQL querries. (Tutorials in SQL, R, Python will be posted shortly.)

Description metadata table

Processing Metadata table

The metadata table contains various data processing information, such as the first and last actual observation of the indicator, the number of approximated, forecasted, backcasted values, last update at source and in our system, and so on.

api.economy.dataobservatory.eu: processing metadata

Authoritative Copies

Greendeal Data Observatory on Zenodo

Metadata

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The Competition Data Observatory temporarily shares an API with the Economy Data Observatory, which serves as an incubator for similar economy-oriented reproducible research resources.

api.economy.dataobservatory.eu: processing metadata

Descriptive Metadata


Identifier	An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context. (Dublin Core item), but several identifiders allowed, and we will use several of them.
Creator	The main researchers involved in producing the data, or the authors of the publication, in priority order. To supply multiple creators, repeat this property. (Extends the Dublin Core with multiple authors, and legal persons, and adds affiliation data.)
Title	A name given to the resource. Extends Dublin Core with alternative title, subtitle, translated Title, and other title(s).
Publisher	The name of the entity that holds, archives, publishes prints, distributes, releases, issues, or produces the resource. This property will be used to formulate the citation, so consider the prominence of the role. For software, use Publisher for the code repository. (Dublin Core item.)
Publication Year	The year when the data was or will be made publicly available.
Resource Type	We publish Datasets, Images, Report, and Data Papers. (Dublin Core item with controlled vocabulary.)

Recommended for discovery

The Recommended (R) properties are optional, but strongly recommended for interoperability.


Subject	The topic of the resource. (Dublin Core item.)
Contributor	The institution or person responsible for collecting, managing, distributing, or otherwise contributing to the development of the resource. (Extends the Dublin Core with multiple authors, and legal persons, and adds affiliation data.) When applicable, we add Distributor (of the datasets and images), Contact Person, Data Collector, Data Curator, Data Manager, Hosting Institution, Producer (for images), Project Manager, Researcher, Research Group, Rightsholder, Sponsor, Supervisor
Date	A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource, besides the Dublin Core minimum we add Collected, Created, Issued, Updated, and if necessary, Withdrawn dates to our datasets.
Related Identifier	An identifier or identifiers other than the primary Identifier applied to the resource being registered.
Rights	We give SPDX License List standards rights description with URLs to the actual license. (Dublin Core item: Rights Management)
Description	Recommended for discovery.(Dublin Core item.)
GeoLocation	Similar to Dublin Core item Coverage

The Subject property: we need to set standard coding schemas for each observatory.
Contributor property:
- DataCurator the curator of the dataset, who sets the mandatory properties.
- DataManager the person who keeps the dataset up-to-date.
- ContactPerson the person who can be contacted for reuse requests or bug reports.
The Date property contains the following dates, which are set automatically by the dataobservatory R package:
- Updated when the dataset was updated;
- EarliestObservation, which the earliest, not backcasted, estimated or imputed observation.
- LatestObservation, which the earliest, not backcasted, estimated or imputed observation.
- UpdatedatSource, when the raw data source was last updated.
The GeoLocation is automatically created by the dataobservatory R package.
The Description property optional elements, and we adopted them as follows for the observatories:
- The Abstract is a short, textual description; we try to automate its creation as much as a possible, but some curatorial input is necessary.
- In the TechnicalInfo sub-field, we record automatically the utils::sessionInfo() for computational reproducability. This is automatically created by the dataobservatory R package.
- In the Other sub-field, we record the keywords for structuring the observatory.

Optional

The Optional (O) properties are optional and provide richer description. For findability they are not so important, but to create a web service, they are essential. In the mandatory and recommended fields, we are following other metadata standards and codelists, but in the optional fields we have to build up our own system for the observatories.


Language	A language of the resource. (Dublin Core item.)
Alternative Identifier	An identifier or identifiers other than the primary Identifier applied to the resource being registered.
Size	We give the CSV, downloadable dataset size in bytes.
Format	We give file format information. We mainly use CSV and JSON, and occasionally rds and SPSS types. (Dublin Core item.)
Version	The version number of the resource.
Rights	We give SPDX License List standards rights description with URLs to the actual license. (Dublin Core item: Rights Management)
Funding Reference	We provide the funding reference information when applicable. This is usually mandatory with public funds.
Related Item	We give information about our observatory partners’ related research products, awards, grants (also Dublin Core item as Relation.) We particularly include source information when the dataset is derived from another resource (which is a Dublin Core item.)

In the Language we only use English (eng) at the moment.
By default We do not use the Alternative Identifier property. We will do this when the same dataset will be used in several observatories.
The Size property is measured in bytes for the CSV representation of the dataset. During creations, the software creates a temporary CSV file to check if the dataset has no writing problems, and measures the dataset size.
The Version property needs further work. For a daily re-freshing API we need to find an applicable versioning system.
The Funding reference will contain information for donors, sponsors, and co-financing partners.
Our default setting for Rights is the CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 license and we provide an URI for the license document.
In the RelatedItem we give information about:
- The original (raw) data source.
- Methodological bibilography reference, when needed.
- The open-source statistical software code that processed the data.

Administrative (Processing) Metadata

Administrative Metadata

Like with diamonds, it is better to know the history of a dataset, too. Our administrative metadata contains codelists that follow the SXDX statistical metadata standards, and similarly strucutred information about the processing history of the dataset.

See for further reference The codebook Class.


Observation Status	SDMX Code list for Observation Status 2.2 (CL_OBS_STATUS), such as actual, missing, imputed, etc. values.
Method	If the value is estimated, we provide modelling information.
Unit	We provide the measurement unit of the data (when applicable.)
Frequency	SDMX Code list for Frequency 2.1 (CL_FREQ) frequency values
Codelist	Euros-SDMX Codelist entries for the observational units, such as sex, etc.
Imputation	SDMX Code list for Frequency 2.1 (CL_IMPUT_METH) imputation values
Estimation	The estimation methodology of data that we calculated, together with citation information and URI to the actual processing code
Related Item	We give information about the software code that processed the data (both Dublin Core and DataCite compliant.)

See an example in the The codebook Class article of the dataobservatory R package.

Regional Climate Change Awareness Datasets: A Regional Geocoding Harmonization Case Study

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

library(regions)
library(lubridate)
library(dplyr)

if ( dir.exists('data-raw') ) {
  data_raw_dir <- "data-raw"
} else {
  data_raw_dir <- file.path("..", "..", "data-raw")
  }

Engage with us on LinkedIn @DigitalMusicObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

Going beyond the national level

Let’s start with a dirty averaging by sub-national unit. The w1 weighting variable contains the post-stratification weight for the national samples. The Eurobarometer samples represent nations (with the exception of East and West Germany, Northern Ireland and Great Britain.) The average of the w1 variable is 1.00 for each sample, but it is not necessarily 1 for smaller territorial units. If sum(w)>1 for say, AT23 it only means that the AT23 region was undersampled relatively to the rest of Austria, and responses must be over-weighted in post-stratification.

There is no way to make the samples become regionally representative, and a correct post-stratification would require further data about the sampel design. But we can simply adjust to over/undersampling by making sure that oversampled territorial averages are proportionally increased and undersampled ones are decreased. [Another ‘dirty’ averaging would be the use of an unweighted average, but our method is better, because it more-or-less adjusts gender and education level biases, but leaves intra-country regional biases in the sample.]

panel <- readRDS((file.path(data_raw_dir, "climate-panel.rds")))

climate_data <-  panel %>%
  mutate ( year: lubridate::year(date_of_interview)) %>%
  select ( all_of(c("isocntry", "geo", "w1")), 
           contains("problem")
  )  %>%
  mutate ( 
    # use the post-stratification weights for national samples
    serious_world_problems_first: w1*serious_world_problems_first , 
    serious_world_problems_climate_change: w1*serious_world_problems_climate_change) %>%
  group_by (  .data$geo ) %>%
  summarise( serious_world_problems_first: mean(serious_world_problems_first, na.rm=TRUE),
             serious_world_problems_climate_change: mean (serious_world_problems_climate_change, na.rm=TRUE),
             mean_w1: mean(w1)
             ) %>%
  mutate ( 
    # adjust for post-stratification weight bias due to regional over/undersampling
    climate_first: serious_world_problems_first / mean_w1, 
    climate_mentioned: serious_world_problems_climate_change / mean_w1
    )

So, we averaged, weighted and adjusted the mentioning of climate change as the world’s most serious, or one of the most serious problems by NUTS regions.

Aggregation level

The problem is that most statistical data is available in for the NUTS regional boundaries according to the NUTS2016 definition. However, GESIS uses NUTS2013 regions, so 252 regional codes in the four survey waves are invalid. Some data is available only on national level, but it can be projected to regional level, because small countries like Luxembourg have no regional divisions. Larger countries like Germany are divided only on state level (NUTS1), while small countries are divided on NUTS3 level.

This leads to various problems. Many data is available only on NUTS2 level, in which case NUTS1 data should be projected to its constituent smaller NUTS2 regions, and NUTS3 level data must be aggregated up to larger, containing NUTS2 levels.

Of course, we also must choose if we use `NUTS2013 or NUTS2016 boundaries. Sub-national boundaries have changed many thousand times in the EU27 countries alone since 1999.

## # A tibble: 5 x 2
##   validate         n
##   <chr>        <int>
## 1 country         15
## 2 invalid        252
## 3 nuts_level_1   132
## 4 nuts_level_2   452
## 5 nuts_level_3   141

Recoding the Regions

Our regions package was designed to keep track of sub-national regional boundary changes. It can validate regional data codes, and to some extent carry out recoding, imputation or simple aggregation.

Recoding means that the boundaries are unchanged, but the country changed the names/codes of regions, because there were other boundary changes which did not affect our observation unit.
Imputation must not be done with usual, general imputation tools, because our data is regionally structured. However, some imputations are very simple, because we can use equality equasions like MT = MT0, MT00.
Often the boundary change is additive, and merged territorial units can simple aggregated for comparison in earlier data.

regional_coding_2016 <- panel %>%
  mutate ( year: lubridate::year(date_of_interview)) %>%
  select (  all_of(c("isocntry", "geo", "region", "year") ) ) %>%
  distinct_all() %>%
  recode_nuts()

regional_coding_2013 <- panel %>%
  mutate ( year: lubridate::year(date_of_interview)) %>%
  select (  all_of(c("isocntry", "geo", "region", "year") ) ) %>%
  distinct_all() %>%
  recode_nuts( nuts_year: 2013)

climate_data_recoded <- climate_data %>% 
  left_join ( regional_coding_2016, by: 'geo' ) %>%
  left_join ( regional_coding_2013 %>% 
                select ( all_of(c("geo", "code_2013"))), 
              by: "geo") %>%
  distinct_all()

saveRDS ( climate_data_recoded , file.path(tempdir(), "climate_panel_recoded_agr.rds"), version: 2)

# not evaluated
saveRDS( climate_data_recoded , file: file.path("data-raw", "climate_panel_recoded_agr.rds"))

Where Are People More Likely To Treat Climate Change as the Most Serious Global Problem?

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

library(regions)
library(lubridate)
library(dplyr)

if ( dir.exists('data-raw') ) {
  data_raw_dir <- "data-raw"
} else {
  data_raw_dir <- file.path("..", "..", "data-raw")
  }

The first results of our longitudinal table were difficult to map, because the surveys used an obsolete regional coding. We will adjust the wrong coding, when possible, and join the data with the European Environment Agency’s (EEA) Air Quality e-Reporting (AQ e-Reporting) data on environmental pollution. We recoded the annual level for every available reporting stations [not shown here] and all values are in μg/m3. The period under observation is 2014-2016. Data file: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/aqereporting-8 (European Environment Agency 2021).

Recoding the Regions

Recoding means that the boundaries are unchanged, but the country changed the names and codes of regions because there were other boundary changes which did not affect our observation unit. We explain the problem and the solution in greater detail in our tutorial that aggregates the data on regional levels.

panel <- readRDS((file.path(data_raw_dir, "climate-panel.rds")))

climate_data_geocode <-  panel %>%
  mutate ( year: lubridate::year(date_of_interview)) %>%
  recode_nuts()

Let’s join the air pollution data and join it by corrected geocodes:

load(file.path("data", "air_pollutants.rda")) ## good practice to use system-independent file.path

climate_awareness_air <- climate_data_geocode %>%
  rename ( region_nuts_codes : .data$code_2016) %>%
  left_join ( air_pollutants, by: "region_nuts_codes" ) %>%
  select ( -all_of(c("w1", "wex", "date_of_interview", 
                     "typology", "typology_change", "geo", "region"))) %>%
  mutate (
    # remove special labels and create NA_numeric_ 
    age_education: retroharmonize::as_numeric(age_education)) %>%
  mutate_if ( is.character, as.factor) %>%
  mutate ( 
    # we only have responses from 4 years, and this should be treated as a categorical variable
    year: as.factor(year) 
    ) %>%
  filter ( complete.cases(.) )

The climate_awareness_air data frame contains the answers of 75086 individual respondents. 17.07% thought that climate change was the most serious world problem and 33.6% mentioned climate change as one of the three most important global problems.

summary ( climate_awareness_air  )

##                  rowid       serious_world_problems_first
##  ZA5877_v2-0-0_1    :    1   Min.   :0.0000              
##  ZA5877_v2-0-0_10   :    1   1st Qu.:0.0000              
##  ZA5877_v2-0-0_100  :    1   Median :0.0000              
##  ZA5877_v2-0-0_1000 :    1   Mean   :0.1707              
##  ZA5877_v2-0-0_10000:    1   3rd Qu.:0.0000              
##  ZA5877_v2-0-0_10001:    1   Max.   :1.0000              
##  (Other)            :75080                               
##  serious_world_problems_climate_change    isocntry    
##  Min.   :0.000                         BE     : 3028  
##  1st Qu.:0.000                         CZ     : 3023  
##  Median :0.000                         NL     : 3019  
##  Mean   :0.336                         SK     : 3000  
##  3rd Qu.:1.000                         SE     : 2980  
##  Max.   :1.000                         DE-W   : 2978  
##                                        (Other):57058  
##                                    marital_status         age_education  
##  (Re-)Married: without children           :13242   18            :15485  
##  (Re-)Married: children this marriage     :12696   19            : 7728  
##  Single: without children                 : 7650   16            : 5840  
##  (Re-)Married: w children of this marriage: 6520   still studying: 5098  
##  (Re-)Married: living without children    : 6225   17            : 5092  
##  Single: living without children          : 4102   15            : 4528  
##  (Other)                                  :24651   (Other)       :31315  
##    age_exact                      occupation_of_respondent
##  Min.   :15.0   Retired, unable to work       :22911      
##  1st Qu.:36.0   Skilled manual worker         : 6774      
##  Median :51.0   Employed position, at desk    : 6716      
##  Mean   :50.1   Employed position, service job: 5624      
##  3rd Qu.:65.0   Middle management, etc.       : 5252      
##  Max.   :99.0   Student                       : 5098      
##                 (Other)                       :22711      
##             occupation_of_respondent_recoded
##  Employed (10-18 in d15a)   :32763          
##  Not working (1-4 in d15a)  :37125          
##  Self-employed (5-9 in d15a): 5198          
##                                             
##                                             
##                                             
##                                             
##                        respondent_occupation_scale_c_14
##  Retired (4 in d15a)                   :22911          
##  Manual workers (15 to 18 in d15a)     :15269          
##  Other white collars (13 or 14 in d15a): 9203          
##  Managers (10 to 12 in d15a)           : 8291          
##  Self-employed (5 to 9 in d15a)        : 5198          
##  Students (2 in d15a)                  : 5098          
##  (Other)                               : 9116          
##                   type_of_community   is_student      no_education     
##  DK                        :   34   Min.   :0.0000   Min.   :0.000000  
##  Large town                :20939   1st Qu.:0.0000   1st Qu.:0.000000  
##  Rural area or village     :24686   Median :0.0000   Median :0.000000  
##  Small or middle sized town: 9850   Mean   :0.0679   Mean   :0.008151  
##  Small/middle town         :19577   3rd Qu.:0.0000   3rd Qu.:0.000000  
##                                     Max.   :1.0000   Max.   :1.000000  
##                                                                        
##    education       year       region_nuts_codes  country_code  
##  Min.   :14.00   2013:25103   LU     : 1432     DE     : 4531  
##  1st Qu.:17.00   2015:    0   MT     : 1398     GB     : 3538  
##  Median :18.00   2017:25053   CY     : 1192     BE     : 3028  
##  Mean   :19.61   2019:24930   SK02   : 1053     CZ     : 3023  
##  3rd Qu.:22.00                EL30   :  974     NL     : 3019  
##  Max.   :30.00                EE     :  973     SK     : 3000  
##                               (Other):68064     (Other):54947  
##      pm2_5             pm10               o3              BaP        
##  Min.   : 2.109   Min.   :  5.883   Min.   : 66.37   Min.   :0.0102  
##  1st Qu.: 9.374   1st Qu.: 28.326   1st Qu.: 90.89   1st Qu.:0.1779  
##  Median :11.866   Median : 33.673   Median :102.81   Median :0.4105  
##  Mean   :12.954   Mean   : 38.637   Mean   :101.49   Mean   :0.8759  
##  3rd Qu.:15.890   3rd Qu.: 49.488   3rd Qu.:110.73   3rd Qu.:1.0692  
##  Max.   :41.293   Max.   :123.239   Max.   :141.04   Max.   :7.8050  
##                                                                      
##       so2              ap_pc1            ap_pc2             ap_pc3       
##  Min.   : 0.0000   Min.   :-4.6669   Min.   :-2.21851   Min.   :-2.1007  
##  1st Qu.: 0.0000   1st Qu.:-0.4624   1st Qu.:-0.49130   1st Qu.:-0.5695  
##  Median : 0.0000   Median : 0.4263   Median : 0.02902   Median :-0.1113  
##  Mean   : 0.1032   Mean   : 0.1031   Mean   : 0.04166   Mean   :-0.1746  
##  3rd Qu.: 0.0000   3rd Qu.: 0.9748   3rd Qu.: 0.57416   3rd Qu.: 0.3309  
##  Max.   :42.5325   Max.   : 2.0344   Max.   : 3.25841   Max.   : 4.1615  
##                                                                          
##      ap_pc4            ap_pc5        
##  Min.   :-1.7387   Min.   :-2.75079  
##  1st Qu.:-0.1669   1st Qu.:-0.18748  
##  Median : 0.0371   Median : 0.01811  
##  Mean   : 0.1154   Mean   : 0.06797  
##  3rd Qu.: 0.3050   3rd Qu.: 0.34937  
##  Max.   : 3.2476   Max.   : 1.42816  
##

Let’s see a simple CART tree! We remove the regional codes, because there are very serious differences among regional climate awareness. These differences, together with education level, and the year we are talking about, are the most important predictors of thinking about climate change as the most important global problem in Europe.

# Classification Tree with rpart
library(rpart)

# grow tree
fit <- rpart(as.factor(serious_world_problems_first) ~ .,
   method="class", data=climate_awareness_air %>%
     select ( - all_of(c("rowid", "region_nuts_codes"))), 
   control: rpart.control(cp: 0.005))

printcp(fit) # display the results

## 
## Classification tree:
## rpart(formula: as.factor(serious_world_problems_first) ~ ., 
##     data: climate_awareness_air %>% select(-all_of(c("rowid", 
##         "region_nuts_codes"))), method: "class", control: rpart.control(cp: 0.005))
## 
## Variables actually used in tree construction:
## [1] age_education                         isocntry                             
## [3] serious_world_problems_climate_change year                                 
## 
## Root node error: 12817/75086: 0.1707
## 
## n= 75086 
## 
##          CP nsplit rel error  xerror      xstd
## 1 0.0240566      0   1.00000 1.00000 0.0080438
## 2 0.0082703      3   0.92783 0.92783 0.0078055
## 3 0.0050000      5   0.91129 0.91425 0.0077588

plotcp(fit) # visualize cross-validation results

summary(fit) # detailed summary of splits

## Call:
## rpart(formula: as.factor(serious_world_problems_first) ~ ., 
##     data: climate_awareness_air %>% select(-all_of(c("rowid", 
##         "region_nuts_codes"))), method: "class", control: rpart.control(cp: 0.005))
##   n= 75086 
## 
##            CP nsplit rel error    xerror        xstd
## 1 0.024056592      0 1.0000000 1.0000000 0.008043837
## 2 0.008270266      3 0.9278302 0.9278302 0.007805478
## 3 0.005000000      5 0.9112897 0.9142545 0.007758824
## 
## Variable importance
## serious_world_problems_climate_change                              isocntry 
##                                    31                                    26 
##                          country_code                                   BaP 
##                                    20                                     8 
##                                 pm2_5                                ap_pc1 
##                                     4                                     3 
##                         age_education                                  pm10 
##                                     2                                     2 
##                             education                                ap_pc2 
##                                     2                                     1 
##                                  year 
##                                     1 
## 
## Node number 1: 75086 observations,    complexity param=0.02405659
##   predicted class=0  expected loss=0.1706976  P(node) =1
##     class counts: 62269 12817
##    probabilities: 0.829 0.171 
##   left son=2 (25229 obs) right son=3 (49857 obs)
##   Primary splits:
##       serious_world_problems_climate_change < 0.5          to the right, improve=2214.2040, (0 missing)
##       isocntry                              splits as  RRLLLRRRLLRLRLLLLLLLLLLRRLLLRLL, improve= 728.0160, (0 missing)
##       country_code                          splits as  RRLLLRRLLRLLLLLLLLLLRRLLLRLL, improve= 673.3656, (0 missing)
##       BaP                                   < 0.4300347    to the right, improve= 310.6229, (0 missing)
##       pm2_5                                 < 13.38264     to the right, improve= 296.4013, (0 missing)
##   Surrogate splits:
##       age_education splits as  ----RRRRRR-RRRRRRRRRR-RRRRRRRRRR-RRRRRRRRRR-RRRRRRRRRR-RRRRRL-RRR-RRRRRRRRR--RRRLLR--R-R, agree=0.664, adj=0, (0 split)
##       pm10          < 7.491315     to the left,  agree=0.664, adj=0, (0 split)
## 
## Node number 2: 25229 observations
##   predicted class=0  expected loss=0  P(node) =0.3360014
##     class counts: 25229     0
##    probabilities: 1.000 0.000 
## 
## Node number 3: 49857 observations,    complexity param=0.02405659
##   predicted class=0  expected loss=0.2570752  P(node) =0.6639986
##     class counts: 37040 12817
##    probabilities: 0.743 0.257 
##   left son=6 (34631 obs) right son=7 (15226 obs)
##   Primary splits:
##       isocntry     splits as  RRLLLRRRLLRLRLLLLLLLLLLRRLLLRLL, improve=1454.9460, (0 missing)
##       country_code splits as  RRLLLRRLLRLLLLLLLLLLRRLLLRLL, improve=1359.7210, (0 missing)
##       BaP          < 0.4300347    to the right, improve= 629.8844, (0 missing)
##       pm2_5        < 13.38264     to the right, improve= 555.7484, (0 missing)
##       ap_pc1       < -0.005459537 to the left,  improve= 533.3579, (0 missing)
##   Surrogate splits:
##       country_code splits as  RRLLLRRLLRLLLLLLLLLLRRLLLRLL, agree=0.987, adj=0.957, (0 split)
##       BaP          < 0.1749425    to the right, agree=0.775, adj=0.264, (0 split)
##       pm2_5        < 5.206993     to the right, agree=0.737, adj=0.140, (0 split)
##       ap_pc1       < 1.405527     to the left,  agree=0.733, adj=0.126, (0 split)
##       pm10         < 25.31211     to the right, agree=0.718, adj=0.076, (0 split)
## 
## Node number 6: 34631 observations
##   predicted class=0  expected loss=0.1769802  P(node) =0.4612178
##     class counts: 28502  6129
##    probabilities: 0.823 0.177 
## 
## Node number 7: 15226 observations,    complexity param=0.02405659
##   predicted class=0  expected loss=0.4392487  P(node) =0.2027808
##     class counts:  8538  6688
##    probabilities: 0.561 0.439 
##   left son=14 (11607 obs) right son=15 (3619 obs)
##   Primary splits:
##       isocntry      splits as  LL---LLR--L-L----------LL---R--, improve=337.5462, (0 missing)
##       country_code  splits as  LL---LR--L-L--------LL---R--, improve=337.5462, (0 missing)
##       age_education splits as  ----LLLLLL-LLLRRRRRRR-RRRRRRRRRL-RRRRRRLLRR-RRRRLLRLRL-RRLRRR-RRR-LLLLRRR-----LR-----L-R, improve=294.0807, (0 missing)
##       education     < 22.5         to the left,  improve=262.3747, (0 missing)
##       BaP           < 0.053328     to the right, improve=232.7043, (0 missing)
##   Surrogate splits:
##       BaP           < 0.053328     to the right, agree=0.878, adj=0.485, (0 split)
##       pm2_5         < 4.810361     to the right, agree=0.827, adj=0.271, (0 split)
##       ap_pc2        < 0.8746175    to the left,  agree=0.792, adj=0.124, (0 split)
##       so2           < 0.3302972    to the left,  agree=0.781, adj=0.078, (0 split)
##       age_education splits as  ----LLLLLL-LLLLLLLRLR-LRRLRRRRRR-RRRRLLLLLR-LRLRLLRRLL-LLRLLR-LLR-RRLLLLL-----RR-----R-L, agree=0.779, adj=0.071, (0 split)
## 
## Node number 14: 11607 observations,    complexity param=0.008270266
##   predicted class=0  expected loss=0.3804601  P(node) =0.1545827
##     class counts:  7191  4416
##    probabilities: 0.620 0.380 
##   left son=28 (7462 obs) right son=29 (4145 obs)
##   Primary splits:
##       age_education                    splits as  ----LLLLLL-LRRRRRRRRR-RRLRRLRRLL-RRRRLRLLRR-RLRLLLRLRL-RR-RR--RRL-L-LLRRR------------L-R, improve=123.71070, (0 missing)
##       year                             splits as  R-LR, improve=107.79460, (0 missing)
##       education                        < 20.5         to the left,  improve= 90.28724, (0 missing)
##       occupation_of_respondent         splits as  LRRLRRRRRLRLLLRLLL, improve= 84.62865, (0 missing)
##       respondent_occupation_scale_c_14 splits as  LRLLLRRL, improve= 68.88653, (0 missing)
##   Surrogate splits:
##       education                        < 20.5         to the left,  agree=0.950, adj=0.861, (0 split)
##       occupation_of_respondent         splits as  LLLLRLLRRLRLLLRLLL, agree=0.738, adj=0.267, (0 split)
##       respondent_occupation_scale_c_14 splits as  LRLLLLRL, agree=0.733, adj=0.251, (0 split)
##       is_student                       < 0.5          to the left,  agree=0.709, adj=0.186, (0 split)
##       age_exact                        < 23.5         to the right, agree=0.676, adj=0.094, (0 split)
## 
## Node number 15: 3619 observations
##   predicted class=1  expected loss=0.3722023  P(node) =0.04819807
##     class counts:  1347  2272
##    probabilities: 0.372 0.628 
## 
## Node number 28: 7462 observations
##   predicted class=0  expected loss=0.326052  P(node) =0.09937938
##     class counts:  5029  2433
##    probabilities: 0.674 0.326 
## 
## Node number 29: 4145 observations,    complexity param=0.008270266
##   predicted class=0  expected loss=0.4784077  P(node) =0.05520337
##     class counts:  2162  1983
##    probabilities: 0.522 0.478 
##   left son=58 (2573 obs) right son=59 (1572 obs)
##   Primary splits:
##       year                     splits as  L-LR, improve=40.13885, (0 missing)
##       occupation_of_respondent splits as  LRLLRRRRRLRLLLRLLL, improve=18.33254, (0 missing)
##       marital_status           splits as  LRRRLRRRLRRLRLLRRRRRRLRLRLLRR, improve=17.86888, (0 missing)
##       type_of_community        splits as  LRLRL, improve=17.55254, (0 missing)
##       age_education            splits as  ------------LLRRRRRRR-RR-RL-RR---LRRR-R--LR-R-R---R-R--RR-RR--RR------RRR--------------R, improve=14.66121, (0 missing)
##   Surrogate splits:
##       type_of_community splits as  LLLRL, agree=0.777, adj=0.412, (0 split)
##       marital_status    splits as  RRLLLLLRLLLLLLLRRRLLLLLLRLRLL, agree=0.680, adj=0.155, (0 split)
##       isocntry          splits as  LL---LL---L-R----------LL------, agree=0.669, adj=0.127, (0 split)
##       country_code      splits as  LL---L---L-R--------LL------, agree=0.669, adj=0.127, (0 split)
##       o3                < 83.06345     to the right, agree=0.650, adj=0.076, (0 split)
## 
## Node number 58: 2573 observations
##   predicted class=0  expected loss=0.4240187  P(node) =0.03426737
##     class counts:  1482  1091
##    probabilities: 0.576 0.424 
## 
## Node number 59: 1572 observations
##   predicted class=1  expected loss=0.43257  P(node) =0.02093599
##     class counts:   680   892
##    probabilities: 0.433 0.567

# plot tree
plot(fit, uniform=TRUE,
   main="Classification Tree: Climate Change Is The Most Serious Threat")
text(fit, use.n=TRUE, all=TRUE, cex=.8)

## Warning in labels.rpart(x, minlength: minlength): more than 52 levels in a
## predicting factor, truncated for printout

saveRDS ( climate_awareness_air , file.path(tempdir(), "climate_panel_recoded.rds"), version: 2)

# not evaluated
saveRDS( climate_awareness_air, file: file.path("data-raw", "climate-panel_recoded.rds"))

Climate Awareness Change in Europe 2013-2019

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Retrospective survey harmonization comes with many challenges, as we have shown in the introduction to this tutorial case study. In this example, we will work with Eurobarometer’s data.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

Please use the development version of retroharmonize:

devtools::install_github("antaldaniel/retroharmonize")

library(retroharmonize)
library(dplyr)       # this is necessary for the example 
library(lubridate)   # easier date conversion

## Warning: package 'lubridate' was built under R version 4.0.4

library(stringr)     # You can also use base R string processing functions

Get the Data

retroharmonize is not associated with Eurobarometer, or its creators, Kantar, or its archivists, GESIS. We assume that you have acquired the necessary files from GESIS after carefully reading their terms and you placed it on a path that you call gesis_dir. The precise documentation of the data we use can be found in this supporting blogpost. To reproduce this blogpost, you will need ZA5877_v2-0-0.sav, ZA6595_v3-0-0.sav, ZA6861_v1-2-0.sav, ZA7488_v1-0-0.sav, ZA7572_v1-0-0.sav in a directory that you will name gesis_dir.

#Not run in the blogpost. In the repo we have a saved version.
climate_change_files <- c("ZA5877_v2-0-0.sav", "ZA6595_v3-0-0.sav",  "ZA6861_v1-2-0.sav", 
                          "ZA7488_v1-0-0.sav", "ZA7572_v1-0-0.sav")

eb_waves <- read_surveys(file.path(gesis_dir, climate_change_files), .f='read_spss')

if (dir.exists("data-raw")) {
  save ( eb_waves,  file: file.path("data-raw", "eb_climate_change_waves.rda") )
}

if ( file.exists( file.path("data-raw", "eb_climate_change_waves.rda") )) {
  load (file.path( "data-raw", "eb_climate_change_waves.rda" ) )
} else {
  load (file.path("..", "..",  "data-raw", "eb_climate_change_waves.rda") )
}

The eb_waves nested list contains five surveys imported from SPSS to the survey class of retroharmonize. The survey class is a data.frame that retains important metadata for further harmonization.

document_waves (eb_waves)

## # A tibble: 5 x 5
##   id            filename           ncol  nrow object_size
##   <chr>         <chr>             <int> <int>       <dbl>
## 1 ZA5877_v2-0-0 ZA5877_v2-0-0.sav   604 27919   139352456
## 2 ZA6595_v3-0-0 ZA6595_v3-0-0.sav   519 27718   119370440
## 3 ZA6861_v1-2-0 ZA6861_v1-2-0.sav   657 27901   151397528
## 4 ZA7488_v1-0-0 ZA7488_v1-0-0.sav   752 27339   169465928
## 5 ZA7572_v1-0-0 ZA7572_v1-0-0.sav   348 27655    80562432

Beware the object sizes. If you work with many surveys, memory-efficient programming becomes imperative. We will be subsetting whenever possible.

Metadata analysis

As noted before, prepare to work with nested lists. Each imported survey is nested as a data frame in the eb_waves list.

Metadata: Protocol Variables

Eurobarometer calls certain metadata elements, like interviewee cooperation level or the date of a survey interview as protocol variable. Let’s start here. This will be our template to harmonize more and more aspects of the five surveys (which are, in fact, already harmonization of about 30 surveys conducted in a single ‘wave’ in multiple countries.)

# select variables of interest from the metadata
eb_protocol_metadata <- eb_climate_metadata %>%
  filter ( .data$label_orig %in% c("date of interview") |
             .data$var_name_orig == "rowid")  %>%
  suggest_var_names( survey_program: "eurobarometer" )

# subset and harmonize these variables in all nested list items of 'waves' of surveys
interview_dates <- harmonize_var_names(eb_waves, 
                                       eb_protocol_metadata )

# apply similar data processing rules to same variables
interview_dates <- lapply (interview_dates, 
                      function (x) x %>% mutate ( date_of_interview: as_character(.data$date_of_interview) )
                      )

# join the individual survey tables into a single table 
interview_dates <- as_tibble ( Reduce (rbind, interview_dates) )

# Check the variable classes.

vapply(interview_dates, function(x) class(x)[1], character(1))

##             rowid date_of_interview 
##       "character"       "character"

This is our sample workflow for each block of variables.

Get a unique identifier.
Add other variables
Harmonize the variable names
Subset the data leaving out anything that you do not harmonize in this block.
Apply some normalization in a nested list.
When the variables are harmonized to same name, class, merge them into a data.frame-like tibble object.

Now finish the harmonization. Wednesday, 31st October 2018 should become a Date type 2018-10-31.

require(lubridate)
harmonize_date <- function(x) {
  x <- tolower(as.character(x))
  x <- gsub("monday|tuesday|wednesday|thursday|friday|saturday|sunday|\\,|th|nd|rd|st", "", x)
  x <- gsub("decemberber", "december", x) # all those annoying real-life data problems!
  x <- stringr::str_trim (x, "both")
  x <- gsub("^0", "", x )
  x <- gsub("\\s\\s", "\\s", x)
  lubridate::dmy(x) 
}

interview_dates <- interview_dates %>%
  mutate ( date_of_interview: harmonize_date(.data$date_of_interview) )

vapply(interview_dates, function(x) class(x)[1], character(1))

##             rowid date_of_interview 
##       "character"            "Date"

To avoid duplication of row IDs in surveys that may not be unique in different surveys, we created a simple, sequential ID for each survey, including the ID of the original file.

set.seed(2021)
sample_n(interview_dates, 6)

## # A tibble: 6 x 2
##   rowid               date_of_interview
##   <chr>               <date>           
## 1 ZA7488_v1-0-0_7016  2018-10-28       
## 2 ZA7488_v1-0-0_19187 2018-11-02       
## 3 ZA6861_v1-2-0_1218  2017-03-18       
## 4 ZA6861_v1-2-0_4142  2017-03-21       
## 5 ZA7572_v1-0-0_12363 2019-04-17       
## 6 ZA7572_v1-0-0_8071  2019-04-18

After this type-conversion problem let’s see an issue when an original SPSS variable can have two meaningful R representations.

Metadata: Geographical information

Let’s continue with harmonizing geographical information in the files. In this example, var_name_suggested will contain the harmonized variable name. It is likely that you have to make this call, after carefully reading the original questionnaires and codebooks.

eb_regional_metadata <- eb_climate_metadata %>%
  filter ( grepl( "rowid|isocntry|^nuts$", .data$var_name_orig)) %>%
  suggest_var_names( survey_program: "eurobarometer" ) %>%
  mutate ( var_name_suggested: case_when ( 
    var_name_suggested == "region_nuts_codes"     ~ "geo",
    TRUE ~ var_name_suggested ))

The harmonize_var_names() takes all variables in the subsetted, geographical metadata table, and brings them to the harmonized var_name_suggested name. The function subsets the surveys to avoid the presence of non-harmonized variables. All regional NUTS codes become geo in our case:

geography <- harmonize_var_names(eb_waves, 
                                 eb_regional_metadata)

If you are used to work with single survey files, you are likely to work in a tabular format, which easily converts into a data.frame like object, in our example, to tidyverse’s tibble. However, when working with longitudinal data, it is far simpler to work with nested lists, because the tables usually have different dimensions (neither the rows corresponding to observations or the columns are the same across all survey files.)

In the nested list, each list element is a single, tabular-format survey. (In fact, the survey are in retroharmonize’s survey class, which is a rich tibble that contains the metadata and the processing history of the survey.)

The regional information in the Eurobarometer files is contained in the nuts variable. We want to keep both the original labels and values. The original values are the region’s codes, and the labels are the names. The easiest and fastest solution is the base R lapply loop.

geography <- lapply ( geography, 
                      function (x) x %>% mutate ( region: as_character(geo), 
                                                  geo   : as.character(geo) )  
)

Because each table has exactly the same columns, we can simply use rbind() and reduce the list to a modern data.frame, i.e. a tibble.

geography <- as_tibble ( Reduce (rbind, geography) )

Let’s see a dozen cases:

set.seed(2021)
sample_n(geography, 12)

## # A tibble: 12 x 4
##    rowid               isocntry geo   region              
##    <chr>               <chr>    <chr> <chr>               
##  1 ZA7488_v1-0-0_7016  SI       SI012 Podravska           
##  2 ZA7488_v1-0-0_19187 PL       PL63  Pomorskie           
##  3 ZA6861_v1-2-0_1218  DK       DK02  Sjaelland           
##  4 ZA6861_v1-2-0_4142  FI       FI1B  Helsinki-Uusimaa    
##  5 ZA7572_v1-0-0_12363 SE       SE12  Oestra Mellansverige
##  6 ZA7572_v1-0-0_8071  IT       ITH   Nord-Est [IT]       
##  7 ZA6861_v1-2-0_6145  IE       IE021 Dublin              
##  8 ZA6861_v1-2-0_24638 RO       RO31  South [RO]          
##  9 ZA7488_v1-0-0_11315 CY       CY    REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS  
## 10 ZA6595_v3-0-0_27568 HR       HR041 Grad Zagreb         
## 11 ZA7572_v1-0-0_17397 CZ       CZ06  Jihovychod          
## 12 ZA6861_v1-2-0_10993 PT       PT17  Lisboa

The idea is that we do similar variable harmonization block by block, and eventually we will join them together. Next step: socio-demography and weights.

Socio-demography and Weights

There are a few peculiar issues to look out for. This example shows that survey harmonization requires plenty of expert judgment, and you cannot fully automate the process.

The Eurobarometer archives do not use all weight and demographic variable names consistently. For example, the wex variable, which is a projected weight for the country’s 15 years old or older population is sometimes called wex, sometimes wextra. The individual survey’s post-stratification weight is the w1 variable, but this is not necessarily what you need to use.

The suggest_var_names() function has a parameter for survey_program: "eurobaromater" which normalizes a bit the most used variables. For example, all variations of wex, wextra wil be noramlized to wex. You can ignore this parameter and use your own names, too.

eb_demography_metadata  <- eb_climate_metadata %>%
  filter ( grepl( "rowid|isocntry|^d8$|^d7$|^wex|^w1$|d25|^d15a|^d11$", .data$var_name_orig) ) %>%
  suggest_var_names( survey_program: "eurobarometer")

As you can see, using the original labels would not help, because they also contain various alterations.

eb_demography_metadata %>%
  select ( filename, var_name_orig, label_orig, var_name_suggested ) %>%
  filter (var_name_orig %in% c("wex", "wextra") )

##            filename var_name_orig                                  label_orig
## 1 ZA5877_v2-0-0.sav        wextra      weight extrapolated population 15 plus
## 2 ZA6595_v3-0-0.sav        wextra      weight extrapolated population 15 plus
## 3 ZA6861_v1-2-0.sav           wex weight extrapolated population aged 15 plus
## 4 ZA7488_v1-0-0.sav           wex weight extrapolated population aged 15 plus
## 5 ZA7572_v1-0-0.sav           wex weight extrapolated population aged 15 plus
##   var_name_suggested
## 1                wex
## 2                wex
## 3                wex
## 4                wex
## 5                wex

demography <- harmonize_var_names ( waves: eb_waves, 
                                    metadata: eb_demography_metadata )

Socio-demographic variables like level of highest education or occupation are rather country-specific. Eurobarometer uses standardized occupation and marital status scales, and a proxy for education levels, age of leaving full-time education.

This is a particularly tricky variable, because it’s coding in fact contains three different variables - school leaving age, except for students, and except for people who did not finish their compulsory primary school. And while school leaving age was a good proxy since the 1970s, in the age when the EU is promoting life-long-learning becomes less and less useful, as people stop and re-start their education throughout their lives.

example <- demography[[1]] %>%
  mutate ( across ( -any_of(c("rowid", "w1", "wex")), as_character) ) %>%
  mutate ( across (any_of(c("w1", "wex")), as_numeric) )
unique ( example$age_education )

##  [1] "22"                     "25"                     "17"                    
##  [4] "19"                     "12"                     "23"                    
##  [7] "18"                     "20"                     "21"                    
## [10] "14"                     "24"                     "16"                    
## [13] "26"                     "15"                     "Still studying"        
## [16] "DK"                     "31"                     "29"                    
## [19] "27"                     "13"                     "32"                    
## [22] "28"                     "30"                     "53"                    
## [25] "42"                     "62"                     "40"                    
## [28] "No full-time education" "Refusal"                "37"                    
## [31] "39"                     "34"                     "35"                    
## [34] "47"                     "36"                     "45"                    
## [37] "51"                     "33"                     "43"                    
## [40] "38"                     "49"                     "46"                    
## [43] "41"                     "57"                     "7"                     
## [46] "48"                     "44"                     "50"                    
## [49] "56"                     "8"                      "11"                    
## [52] "10"                     "9"                      "75 years"              
## [55] "6"                      "3"                      "54"                    
## [58] "55"                     "60"                     "64"                    
## [61] "2 years"                "58"                     "52"                    
## [64] "72"                     "61"                     "4"                     
## [67] "63"

The seamingly trival age_exact variable has its own issues, too:

unique ( example$age_exact)

##  [1] "54"       "66"       "56"       "53"       "33"       "72"      
##  [7] "83"       "62"       "86"       "77"       "64"       "46"      
## [13] "44"       "59"       "60"       "67"       "63"       "20"      
## [19] "43"       "37"       "78"       "49"       "90"       "45"      
## [25] "28"       "29"       "30"       "39"       "51"       "38"      
## [31] "41"       "71"       "25"       "48"       "79"       "88"      
## [37] "61"       "85"       "70"       "35"       "81"       "52"      
## [43] "57"       "27"       "47"       "15 years" "21"       "42"      
## [49] "32"       "68"       "36"       "34"       "19"       "31"      
## [55] "26"       "23"       "24"       "22"       "16"       "84"      
## [61] "65"       "18"       "55"       "40"       "50"       "73"      
## [67] "69"       "87"       "89"       "74"       "75"       "98 years"
## [73] "76"       "80"       "58"       "82"       "17"       "93"      
## [79] "91"       "92"       "95"       "94"       "97"

Let’s see all the strange labels attached to age-type variables:

collect_val_labels(metadata: eb_demography_metadata %>%
                     filter ( var_name_suggested %in% c("age_exact", "age_education")) )

##  [1] "2 years"                  "75 years"                
##  [3] "No full-time education"   "Still studying"          
##  [5] "15 years"                 "98 years"                
##  [7] "96 years"                 "[NOT CLEARLY DOCUMENTED]"
##  [9] "74 years"                 "99 and older"            
## [11] "Refusal"                  "87 years"                
## [13] "DK"                       "88 years"

We must handle many exception, so we created a function for this purpose:

remove_years  <- function(x) { 
  x <- gsub("years|and\\solder", "", tolower(x))
  stringr::str_trim (x, "both")}

process_demography <- function (x) { 
  
  x %>% mutate ( across ( -any_of(c("rowid", "w1", "wex")), as_character) ) %>%
    mutate ( across (any_of(c("w1", "wex")), as_numeric) ) %>%
    mutate ( across (contains("age"), remove_years)) %>%
    mutate ( age_exact: as.numeric (age_exact)) %>%
    mutate ( is_student: ifelse ( tolower(age_education) == "still studying", 
                                   1, 0), 
             no_education: ifelse ( tolower(age_education) == "no full-time education", 1, 0)) %>%
    mutate ( education: case_when (
      grepl("studying", age_education) ~ age_exact, 
      grepl ("education", age_education)  ~ 14, 
      grepl ("refus|document|dk", tolower(age_education)) ~ NA_real_,
      TRUE ~ as.numeric(age_education)
    ))  %>%
    mutate ( education: case_when ( 
      education < 14 ~ NA_real_, 
      education > 30 ~ 30, 
      TRUE ~ education )) 
}

demography <- lapply ( demography, process_demography )

## Warning in eval_tidy(pair$rhs, env: default_env): NAs introduced by coercion

## Warning in mask$eval_all_mutate(quo): NAs introduced by coercion

## Warning in eval_tidy(pair$rhs, env: default_env): NAs introduced by coercion

## Warning in eval_tidy(pair$rhs, env: default_env): NAs introduced by coercion

## Warning in eval_tidy(pair$rhs, env: default_env): NAs introduced by coercion

## Warning in eval_tidy(pair$rhs, env: default_env): NAs introduced by coercion

## WE'll full join and not use rbind, because we have different variables in different waves.
demography <- Reduce ( full_join, demography )

## Joining, by: c("rowid", "isocntry", "w1", "wex", "marital_status", "age_education", "age_exact", "occupation_of_respondent", "occupation_of_respondent_recoded", "respondent_occupation_scale_c_14", "type_of_community", "is_student", "no_education", "education")
## Joining, by: c("rowid", "isocntry", "w1", "wex", "marital_status", "age_education", "age_exact", "occupation_of_respondent", "occupation_of_respondent_recoded", "respondent_occupation_scale_c_14", "type_of_community", "is_student", "no_education", "education")
## Joining, by: c("rowid", "isocntry", "w1", "wex", "marital_status", "age_education", "age_exact", "occupation_of_respondent", "occupation_of_respondent_recoded", "respondent_occupation_scale_c_14", "type_of_community", "is_student", "no_education", "education")
## Joining, by: c("rowid", "isocntry", "w1", "wex", "marital_status", "age_education", "age_exact", "occupation_of_respondent", "occupation_of_respondent_recoded", "respondent_occupation_scale_c_14", "type_of_community", "is_student", "no_education", "education")

Now let’s see what we have here:

set.seed(2021)
sample_n(demography, 12)

## # A tibble: 12 x 14
##    rowid    isocntry    w1    wex marital_status        age_education  age_exact
##    <chr>    <chr>    <dbl>  <dbl> <chr>                 <chr>              <dbl>
##  1 ZA7488_~ SI       0.828  1428. (Re-)Married: withou~ 19                    43
##  2 ZA7488_~ PL       1.01  32830. (Re-)Married: withou~ 19                    64
##  3 ZA6861_~ DK       0.641  3100. (Re-)Married: withou~ 22                    78
##  4 ZA6861_~ FI       1.83   8601. (Re-)Married: childr~ 30                    38
##  5 ZA7572_~ SE       0.342  2645. (Re-)Married: withou~ 17                    68
##  6 ZA7572_~ IT       0.630 32287. (Re-)Married: childr~ 20                    40
##  7 ZA6861_~ IE       0.868  3054. (Re-)Married: childr~ 32                    42
##  8 ZA6861_~ RO       0.724 11805. (Re-)Married: withou~ 14                    59
##  9 ZA7488_~ CY       0.691  1013. (Re-)Married: childr~ 18                    67
## 10 ZA6595_~ HR       0.580  2098. Single living w part~ 27                    30
## 11 ZA7572_~ CZ       1.86  16908. Single: without chil~ still studying        20
## 12 ZA6861_~ PT       0.932  7448. Widow: with children  no full-time ~        84
## # ... with 7 more variables: occupation_of_respondent <chr>,
## #   occupation_of_respondent_recoded <chr>,
## #   respondent_occupation_scale_c_14 <chr>, type_of_community <chr>,
## #   is_student <dbl>, no_education <dbl>, education <dbl>

Harmonizing Variable Labels

So far we have been working with metadata, weights and socio-demography. In other words, we have not even started the desired harmonization of climate change awareness. The methodology is the same, but here we really must look out for the answer options in the questionnaire. (Refer to our data summary again here.)

climate_awareness_metadata <- eb_climate_metadata %>%
  suggest_var_names( survey_program: "eurobarometer" ) %>%
  filter ( .data$var_name_suggested  %in% c("rowid",
                                            "serious_world_problems_first", 
                                             "serious_world_problems_climate_change")
  ) 

hw <- harmonize_var_names ( waves: eb_waves, 
                            metadata: climate_awareness_metadata )

The retroharmoinze package comes with a generic harmonize_values() function that will change the value labels of categorical variables (including binary ones) to a unitary format. It will also take care of various types of missing values.

First, let’s go back to our metadata and collect all value labels that will show up with collect_val_labels():

collect_val_labels(climate_awareness_metadata)

##  [1] "Climate change"                            
##  [2] "International terrorism"                   
##  [3] "Poverty, hunger and lack of drinking water"
##  [4] "Spread of infectious diseases"             
##  [5] "The economic situation"                    
##  [6] "Proliferation of nuclear weapons"          
##  [7] "Armed conflicts"                           
##  [8] "The increasing global population"          
##  [9] "Other (SPONTANEOUS)"                       
## [10] "None (SPONTANEOUS)"                        
## [11] "Not mentioned"                             
## [12] "Mentioned"                                 
## [13] "DK"

In this case, we want to select Climate change as the mentioned most serious problem, and Climate change taken from a list of three serious problems. The first question type is a single-choice one, where Climate change is either mentioned, or the alternative answer is labeled as Not mentioned. In the multiple choice case, the alternative may be something else, for example, Spread of infectious diseases, as we all well know by 2021.

We want to see who thought Climate change was the most serious problem, or one of the most serious problems, so we label each mentions of Climate change as mentioned and we pair it with a numeric value of 1. All other cases are labeled as not_mentioned, with the exceptions of various missing observations, which in these cases are Do not know answers, Declined to answer cases, and Inappropriate cases [The latter one is Eurobarometer’s label for questions that were for one reason or other not asked from a particular interviewee – for example, because the Turkish Cypriot community received a different questionnaire.]

# positive cases
label_1: c("^Climate\\schange", "^Mentioned")
# missing cases 
na_labels <- collect_na_labels( climate_awareness_metadata)
na_labels

## [1] "DK"                             "Inap. (10 or 11 in qa1a)"      
## [3] "Inap. (coded 10 or 11 in qc1a)" "Inap. (coded 10 or 11 in qb1a)"

# negative cases
label_0 <- collect_val_labels( climate_awareness_metadata)
label_0 <- label_0[! label_0 %in% label_1 ]

The harmonize_serious_problems() function harmonizes the labels within the special labeled class of retroharmonize. This class retains all information to give categorical variables a character or numeric representation, and various processing metadata for documentation purposes. While this class is very reach (it contains whatever was imported from SPSS’s proprietary data format and the history), it is not suitable for statistical analysis. We could, of course, directly call the harmonize_values() from the retroharmonize package, but the parameterization would be very complicated even in a simple function call, not to mention a looped call. Because this function is the heart of the retroharmonize package, it has a tutorial article on its own.

harmonize_serious_problems <- function(x) {
  label_list <- list(
    from: c(label_0, label_1, na_labels), 
    to: c( rep ( "not_mentioned", length(label_0) ),   # use the same order as in from!
            rep ( "mentioned", length(label_1) ),
            "do_not_know", "inap", "inap", "inap"), 
    numeric_values: c(rep ( 0, length(label_0) ), # use the same order as in from!
                       rep ( 1, length(label_1) ),
                       99997,99999,99999,99999)
  )
  
  harmonize_values(x, 
                   harmonize_labels: label_list, 
                   na_values: c("do_not_know"=99997,
                                 "declined"=99998,
                                 "inap"=99999), 
                   remove: "\\(|\\)|\\[|\\]|\\%"
  )
}

Our objects are rather big in memory, so first, let’s remove the surveys that do not contain these world problem variables. In this cases, the subsetted and harmonized surveys in the nested list have only one columns, i.e. the rowid.

hw <- hw[unlist ( lapply ( hw, ncol)) > 1 ]

Now we have a smaller problem to deal with. With many surveys, it is easy to fill up your computer’s memory, so let’s start building up our joined panel data from a smaller set of nested, subsetted surveys.

hw <- lapply ( hw, function (x) x %>% mutate ( across ( contains("problem"), harmonize_serious_problems) ) )

Our lapply loop calls an anonymous function which in turn calls the harmonize_serious_problems parameterized version of the harmonize_values() on all variables that have problem in their names.

once we are done, our variables have harmonized names, and harmonized values, and harmonized label, but they are stored in the complex retroharmonize_labelled_spss_survey class, inherited from the haven_labelled_spss in haven.

We reduced our single and multiple choice questions to binary choice variables. We can now give them a numeric representation. Be mindful that retroharmonize has special methods for its special labeled class that retains metadata from SPSS. This means that as_character and as_numeric knows how to handle various types of missing values, whereas the base R as.character and as.numeric may coerce special values to unwanted results. This is particularly dangerous with numeric variables – and this is the reason why we introduced a new set of S3 objects and methods in the package.

We will ignore the differences between various forms of missingness, i.e. the person said that she did not know, or did not want to answer, or for some reason was not asked in the survey. In a more descriptive, non-harmonized analysis you would probably want to explore them as various ‘categories’ and use a character representation.

hw <- lapply ( hw, function(x) x %>% mutate ( across ( contains("problem"), as_numeric) ))

hw <- Reduce ( full_join, hw) # we must use joins instead of binds because the number of columns vary.

Let’s see what we have:

set.seed(2021)
sample_n (hw, 12)

## # A tibble: 12 x 3
##    rowid             serious_world_problems_fi~ serious_world_problems_climate_~
##    <chr>                                  <dbl>                            <dbl>
##  1 ZA6595_v3-0-0_23~                          0                               NA
##  2 ZA7572_v1-0-0_70~                          0                                0
##  3 ZA6595_v3-0-0_18~                          0                               NA
##  4 ZA6861_v1-2-0_27~                          0                                0
##  5 ZA6595_v3-0-0_26~                          0                               NA
##  6 ZA7572_v1-0-0_19~                          0                                1
##  7 ZA5877_v2-0-0_16~                          0                                0
##  8 ZA6861_v1-2-0_12~                          0                                0
##  9 ZA7572_v1-0-0_17~                          0                                0
## 10 ZA5877_v2-0-0_17~                          0                                1
## 11 ZA6861_v1-2-0_41~                          0                                0
## 12 ZA6861_v1-2-0_61~                          0                                1

Creating the Longitudional Table

Now we just need to join the partial table by the rowid together:

#start from the smallest (we removed the survey that had no relevant questionnaire item)
panel <- hw %>%
  left_join ( geography, by: 'rowid' ) 

panel <- panel %>%
  left_join ( demography, by: c("rowid", "isocntry") ) 

panel <- panel %>%
  left_join ( interview_dates, by: 'rowid' )

And let’s see a small sample:

sample_n(panel, 12)

## # A tibble: 12 x 19
##    rowid  serious_world_pr~ serious_world_pr~ isocntry geo   region    w1    wex
##    <chr>              <dbl>             <dbl> <chr>    <chr> <chr>  <dbl>  <dbl>
##  1 ZA686~                 0                 0 ES       ES41  Casti~ 1.21  46787.
##  2 ZA686~                 0                 0 RO       RO31  South~ 0.724 11805.
##  3 ZA686~                 0                 0 SK       SK02  Zapad~ 0.774  3499.
##  4 ZA757~                 0                 1 PT       PT16  Centr~ 1.11   9336.
##  5 ZA659~                 1                NA HR       HR041 Grad ~ 0.580  2098.
##  6 ZA659~                 1                NA RO       RO21  North~ 1.21  20160.
##  7 ZA686~                 0                 0 PT       PT17  Lisboa 0.932  7448.
##  8 ZA659~                 0                NA GB-GBN   UKI   London 0.994 50133.
##  9 ZA757~                 0                 0 CY       CY    REPUB~ 0.594   874.
## 10 ZA686~                 0                 0 LT       LT003 Klaip~ 0.623  1564.
## 11 ZA757~                 0                 0 IE       IE013 West ~ 0.490  1651.
## 12 ZA659~                 0                NA LT       LT003 Klaip~ 1.16   2917.
## # ... with 11 more variables: marital_status <chr>, age_education <chr>,
## #   age_exact <dbl>, occupation_of_respondent <chr>,
## #   occupation_of_respondent_recoded <chr>,
## #   respondent_occupation_scale_c_14 <chr>, type_of_community <chr>,
## #   is_student <dbl>, no_education <dbl>, education <dbl>,
## #   date_of_interview <date>

saveRDS ( panel, file.path(tempdir(), "climate_panel.rds"), version: 2)

# not evaluated
saveRDS( panel, file: file.path("data-raw", "climate-panel.rds"), version=2)

Putting It on a Map

This is not the end of the story. If you put all this on a map, the results are a bit disappointing.

Why? Because sub-national (provincial, state, county, district, parish) borders are changing all the time - within the EU and everywhere. The next step is to harmonize the geographical information. We have another CRAN released package to help you with. See the next post: Regional Climate Change Awareness Dataset.

What is Retrospective Survey Harmonization?

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Reproducible ex post harmonization of survey microdata

Retrospective survey harmonization allows the comparison of opinion poll data conducted in different countries or time. In this example we are working with data from surveys that were ex ante harmonized to a certain degree—in our tutorials we are choosing questions that were asked in the same way in many natural languages. For example, you can compare what percentage of the European people in various countries, provinces and regions thought climate change was a serious world problem back in 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

We developed the retroharmonize R package to help this process. We have tested the package with about 80 Eurobarometer, 5 Afrobarometer survey files extensively, and a bit with Arabbarometer files. This allows the comparison of various survey answers in about 70 countries. This policy-oriented survey programs were designed to be harmonized to a certain degree, but their ex post harmonization is still necessary, challenging and errorprone. Retrospective harmonization includes harmonization of the different coding used for questions and answer options, post-stratification weights, and using different file formats.

Eurobarometer, Afrobaromer, Arab Barometer and Latinobarómetro make survey files that are harmonized across countries available for research with various terms. Our retroharmonize is not affiliated with them, and to run our examples, you must visit their websites, carefully read their terms, agree to them, and download their data yourself. What we add as a value is that we help to connect their files across time (from different years) or across these programs.

The survey programs mentioned above publish their data in the proprietary SPSS format. This file format can be imported and translated to R objects with the haven package; however, we needed to re-design haven’s labelled_spss class to maintain far more metadata, which, in turn, a modification of the labelled class. The haven package was designed and tested with data stored in individual SPSS files.

The author of labelled, Joseph Larmarange describes two main approaches to work with labelled data, such as SPSS’s method to store categorical data in the Introduction to labelled.

Two main approaches of labelled data conversion.

Our approach is a further extension of Approach B. Survey harmonization in our case always means the joining data from several SPSS files, which requires a consistent coding among several data sources. This means that data cleaning and recoding must take place before conversion to factors, character or numeric vectors. This is particularly important with factor data (and their simple character conversions) and numeric data that occasionally contains labels, for example, to describe the reason why certain data is missing. Our tutorial vignette labelled_spss_survey gives you more information about this.

In the next series of tutorials, we will deal with an array of problems. These are not for the faint heart – you need to have a solid intermediate level of R to follow.

Tidy, joined survey data

The original files identifiers may not be unique, we have to create new, truly unique identifiers. Weighting may not be straightforward.
Neither the number of observations or the number of variables (which represents the survey questions and their translation to coded data) is the same. Certain data may be only present in one survey and not the other. This means that you will likely to run loops on lists and not data.frames, but eventually you must carefully join them.

Class conversion

Similar questions may be imported from a non-native R format, in our case, from an SPSS files, in an inconsistent manner. SPSS’s variable formats cannot be translated unambiguously to R classes. retroharmonize introduced a new S3 class system that handles this problem, but eventually you will have to choose if you want to see a numeric or character coding of each categorical variable.
The harmonized surveys, with harmonized variable names and harmonized value labels, must be brought to consistent R representations (most statistical functions will only work on numeric, factor or character data) and carefully joined into a single data table for analysis.

Harmonization of variables and variable labels

Same variables may come with dissimilar variable names and variable labels. It may be a challenge to match age with age. We need to harmonize the names of variables.
The harmonized variables may have different labeling. One may call refused answers as declined and the other refusal. On a simple choice, climate change may be ‘Climate change’ or Problem: Climate change. Binary choices may have survey-specific coding conventions. Value labels must be harmonized. There are good tools to do this in a single file - but we have to work with several of them.

Missing value harmonization

There are likely to be various types of missing values. Working with missing values is probably where most human judgment is needed. Why are some answers missing: was the question not asked in some questionnaires? Is there a coding error? Did the respondent refuse the question, or sad that she did not have an answer? retroharmonize has a special labeled vector type that retains this information from the raw data, if it is present, but you must make the judgment yourself – in R, eventually you will either create a missing category, or use NA_character_ or NA_real_.

That’s a lot to put on your plate.

It is unlikely that you will be able to work with completely unfamiliar survey programs if you do not have a strong intermediate level of R. Our package comes with tutorials for Eurobarometer, Afrobarometer and our development version already covers Arab Barometer, highlighting some peculiar issues with these survey programs, that we hope to give a head start for less experienced R users.

Eurobarometer Surveys Used In Our Project

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In our tutorial series, we are going to harmonize the following questionnaire items from five Eurobarometer harmonized survey files. The Eurobarometer survey files are harmonized across countries, but they are only partially harmonized in time.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

All data must be downloaded from the GESIS Data Archive in Cologne. We are not affiliated with GESIS and you must read and accept their terms to use the data.

Eurobarometer 80.2 (2013)

GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA5877 Data file Version 2.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.12792

Data file: ZA6595 data file (European Commission 2017).
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 83.4 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA6595 Bibtex

QA1a Which of the following do you consider to be the single most serious problem facing the world as a whole? (single choice)

QA1b Which others do you consider to be serious problems? (multiple choice)

QA2 And how serious a problem do you think climate change is at this moment? Please use a scale from 1 to 10, with '1' meaning it is "not at all a serious problem (scale 1-10)

QA4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Fighting climate change and using energy more efficiently can boost the economy and jobs in the EU (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QA4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU could benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QA5 Have you personally taken any action to fight climate change over the past six months? (binary)

Eurobarometer 83.4 (2015)

European Commission, Brussels; Directorate General Communication COMM.A.1 ´Strategy, Corporate Communication Actions and Eurobarometer´GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA6595 Data file Version 3.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13146

Data file: ZA6595 data file (European Commission 2018).
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 83.4 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA6595 Bibtex

Eurobarometer 87.1 (2017)

European Commission, Brussels; Directorate General Communication, COMM.A.1 ‘Strategic Communication’; European Parliament, Directorate-General for Communication, Public Opinion Monitoring Unit GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA6861 Data file Version 1.2.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.12922

Data file: ZA6861 data file.
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 90.2 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA6861 Bibtex

QC1a Which of the following do you consider to be the single most serious problem facing the world as a whole? (single choice)

QC1b Which others do you consider to be serious problems? (multiple choice)

QC2 And how serious a problem do you think climate change is at this moment? Please use a scale from 1 to 10, with '1' meaning it is "not at all a serious problem (scale 1-10)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Fighting climate change and using energy more efficiently can boost the economy and jobs in the EU (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Promoting EU expertise in new clean technologies to countries outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can increase the security of EU energy supplies (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - More public financial support should be given to the transition to clean energies even if it means subsidies to fossil fuels should be reduced. (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Qc5 Have you personally taken any action to fight climate change over the past six months? (binary)

Eurobarometer 90.2 (2018)

European Commission, Brussels; Directorate General Communication, COMM.A.3 ‘Media Monitoring and Eurobarometer’ GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7488 Data file Version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13289

Data file: ZA7488 data file (European Commission 2019a)
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 90.2 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA7488 Bibtex

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Fighting climate change and using energy more efficiently can boost the economy and jobs in the EU (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Promoting EU expertise in new clean technologies to countries outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can increase the security of EU energy supplies (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - More public financial support should be given to the transition to clean energies even if it means subsidies to fossil fuels should be reduced. (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

Eurobarometer 91.3 (2019)

European Commission, Brussels; Directorate General Communication, COMM.A.3 ‘Media Monitoring and Eurobarometer’ GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7572 Data file Version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13372

Data file: ZA7572 data file (European Commission 2019b).
Questionnaire: Eurobarometer 91.3 Basic Bilingual Questionnaire
Citation: ZA7572 Bibtex

QB4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Taking action on climate change will lead to innovation that will make EU companies more competitive (N) (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Promoting EU expertise in new clean technologies to countries outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Reducing fossil fuel imports from outside the EU can benefit the EU economically (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB4 To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? - Adapting to the adverse impacts of climate change can have positive outcomes for citizens in the EU (agreement-disagreement 4-scale)

QB5 Have you personally taken any action to fight climate change over the past six months? (binary)

References

European Commission, Brussels. 2017. “Eurobarometer 80.2 (2013).” GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA5877 Data file Version 2.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.12792. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.12792.

———. 2018. “Eurobarometer 83.4 (2015).” GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA6595 Data file Version 3.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13146. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13146.

———. 2019a. “Eurobarometer 90.2 (2018).” GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7488 Data file Version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13289. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13289.

———. 2019b. “Eurobarometer 91.3 (2019).” GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7572 Data file Version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13372. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13372.

Daniel Antal | CCSI Data Observatory

Data Observatory Labs

Slide navigation

Questions?

Music Eviota

Slide navigation

Contents

Introduction

Our approach

Main Features

Connected Financial and Sustainability Reporting

Why Are We Developing Eviota for Music?

Is There A Film Industry Version?

Questions?

Create Datasets that are Easy to Combine and Reuse

New Data Curators Wanted

Boost your career without a conflict of interest

FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable Digital Assets

How to become a data curator?

Find inspiration from other contributors

Why data observatories?

Good to know

Watch Our 2-min Introduction

Vote Reprex :)

Listen Local Nederland

Check out our projects

Please Choose Reprex in The Hague Innovators Award Online Vote

How to vote?

How to share the word?

Why vote for us?

Get in touch

Listen Local Nederland Meetup in Utrecht

Check out our projects

Surveyharmonization

Survey Harmonization Workflow

Controls

Principles

Timeline

Concepts

Data Model

Question Bank

Translations

Fieldwork

Code and Save

Output harmonization

Presentation

Questions?

Parntership Proposal for Europeana & Network

Open Call for Collaboration on Cultural Heritage Data

What are data observatories?

Do it Smarter

Strategic objectives

Possible Collaboration

Web 3.0 & FAIR

Dissemination Support

Questions?

Slides

Data Observatory 3.0

Controls

What are data observatories?

Do it Smarter

Strategic objectives

Digital Music Observatory

Possible Use Case

Creative and Cultural Sectors Industries Data Observatory

Technical Features

FAIR

Web 3.0

Dissemination Support

Research Automation

Research automation

Questions?

Slides

Data Observatory 3.0

Controls

What are data observatories?

Do it Smarter

Strategic objectives

Digital Music Observatory

Possible Collaboration