The Statistics Division of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) organized an Expert Group Meeting on Affordable Technologies for Disseminating Official Statistics from 5 to 7 October 2005 in Bangkok.

The purpose of the Meeting was to prepare recommendations that would help government departments and the secretariat to appraise available information technologies and standards for their statistical data dissemination strategies and develop user-friendly data dissemination web sites. This would be achieved, among other methods, by assessing the feasibility of using selected low cost software solutions for disseminating official statistics on the web and on CD-ROMs and by reviewing the commonalities of selected web sites that disseminate official statistics in a user-friendly manner. Use of open source software for data dissemination and new data exchange standards (notably SDMX) would also be discussed. In addition the meeting was expected to assist the secretariat in identifying some critical issues related to the facilitation of access to statistical data by all stakeholders in society, and to integrate these issues into the secretariat’s work programme.

• Report of the meeting

• Provisional Agenda
• Provisional Programme
• List of Participants
• A framework for evaluating dissemination packages (442KB)

• Monitoring Human Development: Introduction (673KB ), UNDGO
• Country experience (Cambodia): The National Indicator Database for Monitoring Development Trends (589KB), NIS, Cambodia
• DevInfo Implementation in Thailand (1.2MB) , UNICEF, Thailand
• Monitoring Human Development: DevInfo Next Steps (1.6MB), UNDGO

• PC-Axis Family Software: A Consortium for Dissemination of Statistics (954KB), Statistics Sweden
• The PC-Axis Software Family a ”Consortium” for output databases (832KB), Statistics Sweden
• Using the PC-Axis System in Disseminating Official Statistics (1.2MB), NSCB, Philippines

• The role of costs in official data dissemination: Results of mini survey, UNESCAP

• A country experience, Vanuatu: Population Geographical Information System (PopGIS), (273KB), NSO, Vanuatu
• SPC population GIS project: Putting People on the map, Putting people in the picture (1.2MB), SPC

• REDATAM+SP as a tool for data processing, analysis and dissemination (2.2MB), UNESCAP
• Microdata Management Toolkit: Documentation, dissemination and preservation of survey and census data (804KB), UNESCAP

• A brief introduction to SDMX Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange, UNESCAP
• Emerging e-standards and statistical information exchange, UNESCAP