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In 2007 and 2008, Dialogic conducted a study on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs on the (im)possibilities of using the internet directly as a source for formal CBS statistics, Internet as Datasource. Direct in the sense of automated data collection from the internet using web robots, direct links to databases, and local tracking of browsing behaviour.
Back then, the results were presented to EuroStat and the OECD. With that study, we were clearly ahead of the curve in developments. This is evident from Google recently initiating a pilot on this topic that we had already elaborated on in this study (automatically gathering consumer prices from price comparison sites to track inflation development real-time), a practice also adopted by the CBS.
In the autumn of 2010, as a follow-up to our research in the Netherlands, the European Commission launched a tender for conducting a similar feasibility study, but at the European level. Dialogic won this tender and will now be carrying out the research in various locations in Europe, in collaboration with the Dutch company Digital Architects (for web crawlers), the German company Ipoque (for deep packet inspection), the CBS, and the English-Chinese legal expert Dr. Faye Fangfei Wang (for legal aspects).
The contact person for this project is Mr. Ing. Reg Brennenraedts.