Data Scraping for Statistics

The Internet as a Data Source for Official Statistics

Statistics is concerned with data collection, organization, review, analysis, interpretation, and presentation. So, accurate and relevant information is vital for statistical estimates and reports with a higher level of accuracy. The richest source of information that can be used for various purposes is the internet. However, the amount of web data is enormous, and the World Wide Web can be considered a source of Big Data.

Why Scrape Data from the Internet for Statistics?

The information on the internet is often unstructured and stored in various formats, but data scraping for statistics is a perfect way to parse necessary details to transform them into reliable structured datasets ready for analysis. Scraping information from the web allows you to automatically collect larger amounts of data in a shorter span of time. Thus, the internet as a source for official statistics minimizes errors. It increases statistical data quality. By applying automatic data collection methods, statisticians are able to react effectively to the increasing volume of internet data resources.

Who Needs Web Scraping for Statistical Purposes?

The World Wide Web allows users to find real and up-to-date information for statistics and data science in any area of interest—from daily weather conditions to rental housing prices. There are plenty of experts relying on it as the main source of data:

• Governmental analytics
• Statistics experts
• Scientists
• Specialists of various industries who locate real data on the internet for their investigations
• Students who gather information from the web and convert it into a structured form for their studies
• E-commerce businesses that use statistics data scraping for inventory and price comparison
• National statistical agencies in Italy, Germany, and Holland, for instance, rely on web data scraping as a form of price details collection for specific consumer products (electronics, real-estate, medicine, and so on). Automatic price gathering leads to less workload for humans and allows for higher quality statistics.
• The US has launched automatic tax revenue collections tools.
• Canada looks for ways to decrease the burden on survey responders through automatic statistics data scraping.

So the opportunities for statistics and data science are enormous, and the demand for data scraping services and tools continues to grow.

Why Choose DataOX for Statistics Data Scraping?

• We provide both data delivery services and custom software solutions development for web scraping.
• We know how to best arrange your scraping process according to your specific needs.
• Our experts know how to handle challenges of data scraping for statistics: which sites to scrape, how to detect the most up-to-date relevant and complete sources, and how to avoid legal issues.
• The DataOx Team deals with data scraping organization and transforms collected information into the format requested by the client.
• We know how to provide our clients with software that can be easily handled by non-IT statistics specialists, and we provide support and maintenance for the tools developed by DataOx.

If you are interested in data scraping for statistical purposes, schedule a consultation with our expert and decide on the option you need.