Analysis of methodologies for using the Internet for the collection of information society and other statistics

The aim of this project was to assess the feasibility of employing modern and enhanced methodologies and indicators for collecting high quality statistics from non-traditional data sources such as the Internet () or Big Data Sources. Concrete objectives were to elaborate an up-to-date conceptual framework of ICT statistics and related indicators from data collected using Internet as a data source or big data repositories. The framework should take into account methodological considerations such as definition of the universe, definition of observation and statistical units, selection of observation units and definition of characteristics or indicators, to exploit the feasibility of extending Eurostat's methods and indicators for collecting ICT official statistics from non traditional sources. The feasibility of collection of data directly through the user should be explored and the collection of statistical data from enterprises web-sites should be elaborated. Another objective was to implement and test the methods and indicators developed for the two different approaches as a proof of concept and to collect information on a possible large scale implementation and to exploit the feasibility of using Big Data Repositories as official data sources and examine their potential of either supplementing official statistics or even completely replacing official statistics indicators, especially to describe in the form of use cases five data repositories related to statistical domains and assess their feasibility across the technical, organizational, methodological, cost-benefit, legal and socio-political dimension. Another objective was to elaborate an accreditation procedure which will analyze and assess the required quality aspects of a board range of possible resources in order to qualify statistical data as official statistics. The accreditation procedure should be in-line with the principles and guidelines of Eurostat related to the quality assurance as well as the European Statistics code of practice.