Friday, November 13, 2009

E-STAT: Census of Agriculture

Question



We are assisting a local non-profit heritage conservancy group with a GIS project. This group works closely with a number of researchers at Trent University and  hopes to eventually publish a map which would provide data about our local region. At the moment,  they are particularly interested in information about Number of Farms and Average age of Farmers (by county and district) over time. Though most data required is in the public domain; there are a few exceptions where the data  seems most readily available in ESTAT rather than our DSP collection or the STC web site.

Can we supply ESTAT Census of Agriculture data broken down by age and  county to a non-profit group?

For example:
ESTAT - 1996 Census of Agriculture - Characteristics of Farm Operators - 1996 Ont. ( 49 Counties, regional municipalities, etc) :

Average age of Operators by County and District.
Peterborough County: 51.7
Haliburton County: 51.4

If I need to redirect this question to ESTAT, please let me know.

Answer

Anyone can now access E-STAT since there is no more password required.  Staff from the local non-profit heritage conservancy group could pull out the data from E-STAT themselves. The password has been removed but no formal announcement has been done. I had mentioned it at the last Ontario DLI training as well as to the last EAC meeting.

This will make your life easier otherwise you would not have been able to provide that non-profit organization these data.

Question

Could you clarify just a bit more re: E-STAT.  Does this mean that we do not have to authenticate for off-campus users -- at all?  We can leave it wide open?

Answer

I have to retract what I said yesterday for the use of ESTAT because the license that you accept  provides the authorization to use the data for educational purposes only.  Although there are no password, there are restrictions in terms of use when you accept the license.

On the other hand, I am checking what agreement DSP has with StatCan concerning the access to ESTAT.  Usually, when data is accessed through DSP, the objective is to service the general public.

No better luck on the DSP side. The license is the same and it is restricted to educational purposes only. Hopefully, in a not too far future, this product will be open to everyone. Sorry for the false feeling of joy I may have created.

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