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Nov 10 2009

Surfacing ABS data as XML

Posted by Ben Hughes in Programming, tags: , ,

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has a wealth of information available on its website, the vast majority released under a Creative Commons license. Unfortunately though the data is made available in Excel files which  makes  programmatic access a little painful.

To help get around this I’ve created a very simple service that converts time series data from the ABS into XML. It is deployed on AppEngine as absxml.

It’s still in its early days - if you have a look on the Issues part of the Project page you’ll see some of the things that are yet to be done. However I’m hopeful that it will prove to be a useful stop-gap tool until the ABS starts releasing its data as XML.

absxml is open source, using the very open MIT license (read: do whatever you want) and the full source is available from the project page.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Surfacing ABS data as XML”
  1. Adam Kennedy says:
    November 10, 2009 at 11:33 pm

    Veeeery interesting, I must say.

  2. Aquila says:
    November 11, 2009 at 10:01 pm

    Been pushing for ages to release time series as XML … ffs the Excel spreadsheets you are referencing start life as XML before being converted to Excel and them pumped out to the website. Why not make both formats available? It would be so easy to do technically.

  3. ben says:
    November 12, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    The pre-Excel XML is apparently pretty horrendous and not really fit for public consumption. I agree though, it sounds like it should be relatively trivial.

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