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Voiceover of the CDB presentation to the High Level segment on IT of ECOSOC (July 2000)

1. The UN Statistics Division is using new information technologies to reorganize and re-engineer its vast statistical databases and to meet mushrooming user demand for comprehensive global statistics on Internet.

2. Easy access to statistics on Internet is being driven by a demand curve which is increasing in parallel with the exponential growth of Internet access generally.

To put international statistics on Internet, the Statistics Division is mobilizing new database, client/server, multi-tier and Internet-enabling technologies.

3. To meet the demand for comprehensive data at one Internet site, the Statistics Division has applied these new technologies to develop a consolidated data source in its UNESIS Common Database. The Common Database draws on statistics from throughout the UN system and brings them together using a common platform and interface, and global statistical standards.

4. The Common Database uses a Web browser interface to provide access to hundreds of statistical series for all countries and areas of the world, with extensive descriptions of the international sources and methods used in compiling the data. The series can be accessed alphabetically, by sources or by topics. For each series international sources and definitions of terms are given.

5. The UNESIS Common Database contains more than eight million data elements in more than 300 statistical series. In most cases time series are available from 1970 or 1980 and many series are disaggregated to show underlying distributions. It draws on more than 30 sources in DESA and the United Nations system. The Common Database is unique among large Web databases in providing for each series comprehensive footnotes and meta-information on sources, definitions and frequency of updates. Because a true relational database underlies the Web interface, updated data and meta-information is immediately available to uses.

6. Among the main data sources are the Statistics Division's own databases in merchandise trade, national accounts, demography and population, energy, status of women and industrial commodities production; and statistics from the Population Division, DESA's Project Link, FAO, ILO, IMF, ITU, OECD, UNESCO, WHO, WIPO, World Bank and World Tourism Organization, among others.

7. The UNESIS Common Database also provides complete meta-information never before available in such a comprehensive database. New tools are used to fully integrate this meta-information with the statistics.

8. The UNESIS Common Database is fully Web-enabled for access using a standard browser such as Internet Explorer or Navigator. You can instantly view selected data or country profiles, compile graphs and distributions of selected series, calculate certain derived measures and export data to your desktop in several popular formats for further analysis.

9. How does it work? The UNESIS Common Database home page is the basic data view. The main menu is on the left throughout the system. Use basic data view in the main menu to immediately retrieve data in HTML for one series, up to ten countries and up to 20 years.

10. For country profiles, use the country profiles menu button to immediately retrieve a profile in HTML for one country in one of eleven subject fields.

11. In this example, the economic growth and investment profile has been selected for Bangladesh. Available data for a wide variety of economic growth and investment indicators from several different key sources are immediately displayed from 1990 to latest available year.

12. Choose "topics" to display a list of all of the series in the UNESIS Common Database related to one topic.

13. The example shown here is for the topic "development assistance". This screen shot shows the first part of the list for available series in the UNESIS Common Database for this topic.

14. To review the full list of data sources for the UNESIS Common Database, click on "sources" in the main menu. Click on any source listed for complete information on that source, including frequency of publication and updating.

15. For any series in the UNESIS Common Database, standard international definitions of all of the statistical terms are provided. This example explains the standard international concept of "gross domestic product aggregates in US dollars". The definition reference, shown at the bottom of the screen, is the UN Statistics Division annual publication, series S, note to table 22. (Click on the reference author for the full citation to the source of the definition.)

16. Anyone at Headquarters with access to the Headquarters intranet can now access the UNESIS Common Database using the URL UNCDB with Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. The UNESIS common Database will soon be available at the main UN offices away from Headquarters and later this year will be made available on Internet.

17. The UNESIS Common Database is a unique statistical resource of the UN system. More series and sources will be added by the Statistics Division as experience is gained and on the basis of user feedback. Among the first priorities is to include data from the regional commissions, which have worked closely with the Division in developing the UNESIS Common Database.

18. Thank you for your attention. Call or e-mail the Statistics Division with your comments, questions and suggestions.