ResearchBuzz

There’s a new service for both locating airports or seaports worldwide. It is a subscription service, however ($17.95 a month). It’s located at http://www.findaport.net .

The site encompasses 1200 airports and 1000 “major” seaports. You can do a search by specifying a country or a city. Then you get a list of available ports, maps, and Web sites. Unfortunately, you can do no searching at all — not even to get teaser information — without logging in. You can’t even pay $5 for a sample search. I was initially interested in this site because I’ve been dealing a lot with freight considerations at work. But I’m not getting enough of a taste of the site to make a decision on the subscription service.

A big thank you to Barclay Blog, who pointed me to the Foreign Information by Country page by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

This resource is not something like the CIA World Factbook, which in itself contains a great deal of information on each country. Instead this site aggregates links to country information throughout the Internet. For example, Take Belize, for example. There’s one image (the flag) which links to the World Factbook entry for Belize. After that it’s all (well-annotated and titled) links.

They’re divided into categories. The Belize page has categories for Belizean Government Information (many of the links from Belize itself), country profiles (CIA, BBC, and many more), articles and databases, diplomatic relations, health, and peacekeeping and military information. Finally at the end of the list there’s suggestions for searching the library catalog and related categories.

Some categories had just a few links, while others — like the country profiles category — had well over a dozen. I am in awe of how much time this must have taken.

Thanks to Novalawcity for the pointer to UNData, a search tool for UN Statistics. It’s available at http://data.un.org/ aaaaand it’s in beta.

It looks like a regular search engine, with different tabs for searching data and glossary. (A “more” tab has additional options: going to an advanced search, browsing available statistics, looking at information by country, and reviewing available sources.) Suggested searches are shown along with a list of databases (the front page notes that more databases will be added “in due course” and that over 55 million records are currently being searched.)

I did a search for “south africa” exports. I got 118 results. Results look very Googly except for the left nav which allows you to filter by data type — in this case key indicators, MDG, National Accounts Official Country Data, and Trade. The results themselves allow you to preview a sample of the data, download the data (sometimes just in one format, like XML, and sometimes in multiple format, like tab- or comma-delimited), or explore similar data sets. You can click on the name of the data set to explore it and filter by various data points. The data set pages also contain the source name, source’s home page, and contact information.

There’s a FAQ available for this tool but it doesn’t say how often the database of records is updated. You can also get a little more information about the project here.

Hey! Check Amazon for books on demographics.