This work package is being carried out by 10 of the Web Intelligence Network partners: NSI (Bulgaria) will be leading, with contributions from: STATA (Austria), BBB (Germany), HSL (Germany), FI (Finland), INSEE (France), CBS (Netherlands), GUS (Poland), SE (Sweden), and ONS (UK).
The purpose of Work Package 3 (WP3) is to explore the potential of new types of web data sources still not integrated in the WIH, with a view to their future integration. To achieve this objective, six new “proof of concept” use cases will be undertaken:
- Characteristics of the real estate market - This use-case will explore new data sources, to monitor the real estate market on an ongoing basis through analyzing publicly available online data sources as broadly as possible (e.g. websites of real estate agents, search engines for real estate sales offers presenting ads from primary and secondary market, as well as real estate available for rent).
- Construction activities – this use-case will explore real estate web portals to seek out information on construction activities, which often have higher spatial accuracy and can detect real estate in the earlier stages of the construction planning.
- Online prices of household appliances and audio-visual, photographic and information processing equipment (and generalising the data-collection to other activities) - this use-case aims to collect data by web scraping online shop prices to lower the costs of price statistics production. In addition, the collected web data will be used for producing experimental statistics. This ‘proof-of-concept’ will also investigate whether (and under which conditions) it could be expanded by combining web-scraped data with scanner-data for improvements in price collection and product classification.
- Experimental indices in tourism statistics (hotel prices) - this use-case aims to develop a set of spatial indices for tourism statistics, e.g. prices for hotels, depending on geographical area of interest and date. These types of experimental indices could be used in price statistics either for imputation or for augmenting traditional statistics or in tourism statistics. Also, the use-case will explore whether it is possible to develop new indices to track rental activities across spatiotemporal areas.
- Business register quality enhancement – this use-case will explore internet data as a potential source of information about businesses. For instance, online data may provide information about the kind of activities that businesses perform or offer potential information about the dynamics of the entities. It is hoped that this would reduce the need for large amounts of manual effort needed to maintain a statistical business register in various activities.
- Faster Economic Indicators using new data sources - this use-case will explore the use of publicly available traffic camera data to understand busyness in UK city centers. The project will look at street scenes, and explore busyness by mode of transport, such as pedestrians, bicycles and other vehicle types such as car or bus. The project will focus on ‘busyness’ as a proxy for the health of the local economy, as Covid-19 restrictions are imposed or lifted.
Based on the results of the execution of the above use-cases, the ideal option will be to move to the production of experimental statistics.