I have been playing around with some of the open data on the Irish open data portal at data.gov.ie, reading in the datasets using Python through the APIs. One of the publishers is the Central Statistics Office (CSO) which is responsible for over 4,000 of the datasets published on the Irish open data portal.

The list of packages (datasets) can be retrieved through the open data portal using the CKAN API with the package_list action.

The details of a dataset can then be retrieved using the package_show API action and the package name returned from package_list as a query parameter.

You can also get a list of all the datasets by a particular organisation (publisher) such as the CSO using the organization_show API action. The organization_list action can be used to retrieve the list of publishers.

Most of the CSO datasets are available in either PX or JSON_STAT formats. JSON-stat is used by various institutions for publishing statistical data.

The JSON-STAT datasets are straightforward to read into Python using one of the packages. I will detail this more in my Open data project post under the projects section. One such package is the pyjstat. Another one is jsonstat.py.

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The Central Statistics Office also has a widget feature where you can embed the data into your HTML web page. See example of CSO data widget.