Sharing or linking to data or resources

One of the most powerful features of the statistics.gov.scot site is the fact that everything has its own page on the world wide web - this makes every data point, area, and table a part of the web.

So, in much the same way as you can link to a news article on the BBC News website, you can link to anything on statistics.gov.scot. (Applications of this are explored in greater detail in this blog post).

Of course, once you've downloaded some data, you can also send this to a colleague. The traditional way would be to download the data as CSV, and email it as an attachment, or save it into a shared folder (e.g. on Dropbox or Google Drive). And whilst this is likely to be suitable for certain purposes, there is an opportunity to share a much richer dataset with additional context provided.

To do this, simply copy the link from the address bar on any page on statistics.gov.scot. This can then be pasted into an email, a text message, tweet, etc.

For example, the table shown below …

… has the link ..

https://statistics.gov.scot/slice?dataset=http%3A%2F%2Fstatistics.gov.scot%2Fdata%2Fdwellings-council-tax&http%3A%2F%2Fpurl.org%2Flinked-data%2Fcube%23measureType=http%3A%2F%2Fstatistics.gov.scot%2Fdef%2Fmeasure-properties%2Fcount&http%3A%2F%2Fpurl.org%2Flinked-data%2Fsdmx%2F2009%2Fdimension%23refPeriod=http%3A%2F%2Freference.data.gov.uk%2Fid%2Fyear%2F2017

If you follow that link, it will take you straight to the table. From here, you (or anyone with whom you share the link) can use the filters to create a different table from the dataset, view the contextual information about the dataset, or even get API details if you want to make web apps yourself.

The power of being able to provide a link to anything on the site is not only seen in sharing via email or social media - it means that things can be referenced from within reports, policy documents, news articles, or data visualisations.

Worked Example

Suppose a researcher is writing a report about population estimates across council areas. They can use statistics.gov.scot to get the data for the report.

If they write a paragraph that says:

“In 2017, the population estimate for people of a pensionable age was 1,012,567 for the whole of Scotland. 7.6% of those of people of pensionable age were from the City of Edinburgh”

Then because that specific slice of the data has its own URL, the researcher can either reference that dataset as a footnote:

“In 2017, the population estimate for people of a pensionable age was 1,012,567 for the whole of Scotland. 7.6% of those of people of pensionable age were from the City of Edinburgh[1]"

1. Source: Statistics.gov.scot (this links to the spreadsheet used)

Or even hyperlink from the text itself:

“In 2017, the population estimate for people of pensionable age across Scotland was 1,012,567, with 7.6% of this estimate from the City of Edinburgh council area.”

Either of these options enhance the document, by acting as a platform by which other people - researchers, service managers, policy leads - can verify the source of the data, or even conduct their own analyses.

Summary

• copy the link from the address bar on any page on statistics.gov.scot.
• Paste the link into an email, report, a text message, tweet, etc.