There are two major networks
for statistic data dissemination in Macau, one
is the Internet and the other is the government
network called InforMac. The history of Internet
in Macau is quite short, the first Internet Service
Provider in Macau is the telephone company(CTM),
hey launched this service to the public in the
middle of 1995. After 2-year development, today
there are four ISPs and about 7000 users in Macau.
Beside Internet, there is a government network
called InforMac, which connects all the government
departments in Macau. The objective of InforMac
is providing a means for sharing information,
transferring data and e-mails among departments.
Due to security reason, InforMac is still a closed
network, the public is not able to access this
network. But as Internet access are commonly required
by the departments and in fact some departments
has connected to Internet by their own, it is
foreseeable that the InforMac will connect to
Internet in a near future.
Data
Dissemination in Internet
Most of the government departments
have put their information on Internet, such as
the tourist information, city guide, legislation
information etc. are all available on Internet.
Macau Census and Statistics Department (DSEC)
started releasing statistic information in Internet
since 1996, the pages were designed and created
by DSEC and stored in the server of the ISP. In
1997, DSEC has established a 128KB link to the
ISP and connected our local area network to Internet
through a proxy server, all desktop PCs in our
office can access Internet now. We have also set
up our e-mail server and WWW server, our home
page address is http://www.dsec.gov.mo.
The information available in
our WWW server includes the information of Macau
Statistical Information System (SIEM), Macau Census
and Statistics Department (DSEC), and the latest
statistic data of four majors categories: economic,
social, demography and environment. At this moment,
all pages are static pages; the figures in the
pages are updated periodically.
Future
Development
The next attempt of DSEC in
Internet will be on development of browse-based
applications. These applications will allow the
user to find the information in our online database.
We are studying the possibility of creating a
metadata pool, the user can inquire the information
freely by specifying different variables, and
the system will format the resulting data in html
format. The first candidate application of this
system will be the external trade statistics because
it is one of the major products of DSEC and the
public has a lot of interest in the data.
Until the time of writing, DSEC
does not have any attempt on data collection through
Internet, however, we are optimistic on the future
development of this application, the reasons are:
The coverage
rate of telephone network is very high in
Macau;
IT education in Macau
starts from primary schools, young people
has the basic knowledge of computers and Internet;
Internet is expanding
incredible fast in the last decade, we believe
that it will reach every family in a foreseeable
future.
