Caliper migrates to the UN Global Platform

FAO, UNSD and BC3 collaborate to improve the interoperability of statistical classifications

02/12/2024

FAO, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNSD) and the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) are collaborating to make the entire International Family of Statistical Classifications more FAIR, accessible and usable for a wider audience - from casual users to expert statisticians, as well as directly to computer applications - through Caliper. Each partner will contribute their separate strengths and skills to contribute to this common goal. FAO offers Caliper and the related know-how accumulated during its years of development; UNSD brings access to the full range of classifications under its stewardship; and BC3 contributes with state-of-art technical and scientific knowledge.

The partnership, conceived with an initial pilot phase of two years, aims to deliver publication of all classifications of the International Family as machine-actionable resources, a' la Linked Open Data. New partners, organizations maintaining international, regional or national classifications, are also welcome to join and further strengthen the partnership.

As of today, all Caliper services have been migrated to the servers of BC3, a sector hub of the UN Global Platform since 2022. Next steps include increasing the number of classifications accessible through Caliper, and further testing the Caliper editing environment for revising existing classifications, especially those that depend on inter-organizational collaboration. The editing environment is powered by VocBench, an open-source project led by Italy’s University of Tor Vergata.

Why this is important

Data, and in particular statistical data, inform virtually all aspects of our life. Data is used as a basis to elaborate and promote public policy, and to develop new or enhanced products and services for the marketplace. It is critical, therefore, that the meaning of the data, as provided by statistical classification systems, is easily accessible, explorable and understandable to both a very wide range of human actors, as well as being seamlessly interrogable digitally by computer-based applications without risk of corruption or information loss. Caliper addresses these needs.

The migration of Caliper to the UN Global Platform, and the publication of the International Family of Statistical Classifications as Linked Open data, represents one more important step towards the modernization of official statistics.

What is going to change for users

Very little! All Caliper services remain available from the FAO website of Caliper. For direct access to the Caliper services at the UN Global Platform, you only need to update your bookmarks and save these new addresses:

Browsing: https://caliper.integratedmodelling.org/caliper/browse/showvoc/#/home

Querying: https://caliper.integratedmodelling.org/caliper/sparql/

All data URIs remains unchanged.

Caliper - Statistical Classifications in a Linked Open World

Caliper migrates to the UN Global Platform