Please provide public access to the raw data that sits behind each of the graphs on the website: http://www.gw.govt.nz/monitoring/.
- Needing to click into Greater Wellington's website for the data.
- Being unable to generate more views of the data than what is provided by the graphs.
- Needing more sophisticated vizualisations.
- Needing more than one site vizualised at the same time.
- Needing to talk to someone at Greater Wellington for access.
Investigating options
We are currently in the process of further developing our website to allow viewing of the samples as well as the graph, and also providing further options for users in terms of being able to choose different outputs, e.g. daily average tables, cumulative graphs etc.
At this stage we are not exploring options for downloading of the data by the general public. We are generally able to assist the public with their data requests in a more efficient and helpful way if we help them personally.
9 Votes
Agency responded
1 Subscriber
Jon Marks (Greater Wellington Regional Council)
Hi Brenda, I did reply to your question yesterday but somehow the comment hasn't appeared, so here I'll try again!
What we find in 90% of data requests is that a user asks for an entire dataset, when they are usually after a subset or summary such as daily totals or averages. In many cases an entire dataset can be tens of thousands of lines in an Excel spread sheet, and most users do not have the statistical packages required to calculate daily totals or averages (which in the case of some continuous data, is not as simple as applying an arithmetic mean through the data). This is why we have found it useful to talk the user first to determine what exactly it is that they're after, thereby being more efficient by saving numerous emails or phone calls back and forth.
Having said all that, in the last 6 years since that first comment, we have developed a new website that allows users to download the raw data or subsets of data such as daily totals or averages (http://graphs.gw.govt.nz/). For large datasets we still recommend contacting us directly as they can take some time to download.
Brenda
Can you elaborate on how requiring us to manually request the data each time is more efficient and helpful?