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EU Linked Open Data cloud
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Non-observed values in Eurostat #28

Closed csarven closed 12 years ago

csarven commented 12 years ago

re Aftab's note: "Certain data sets contains ‘-’ as the observation value. We treated such values (i.e., ‘-’) as 0 while representing observation vlaues in RDF."

It is interesting to know why - is turned into 0. They have different meanings and will be treated differently. My intuition tells me that - means that there is no value, however a 0 would indicate that's the actual observed value.

If such observations don't have an observed value, why were they kept in the dataset?

aftiqb commented 12 years ago

We assumed - to be 0 although we could be wrong with our assumption. If an observation has no value then Eurostat represents it with :. We ignored those observations where we encounter : while doing RDF transformation

aftiqb commented 12 years ago

k, it turned out that we were wrong with our assumption regarding -. In Eurostat, - refers to not applicable. check out the special character document published by Eurostat. The document states:

The previously used special value '-' = not applicable (incl. real zero) is no longer used in the online database; it has been replaced by the flag 'z'.