Sourcing the Data

Early November 2009

Content is King

We all agreed that the real intellectual property of analyzeVietnam would be the content. Businesses, strategists, marketing managers and B-Schools would want to use analyzeVietnam essentially for the insights brought forth by its ‘content’.

The checklist of items to address were as follows:
- What databases are currently available on Vietnam?
- What level of detail do they provide?
- How was the data collected by these databases?Are these sources reliable?
- Is the data across these databases consistent?
- Which of these are free and which paid? What are the copyrights details?

We spent the first few days scouring all the available databases on Vietnam. We soon found that almost all the international databases provided macro level data, no where near the level of granularity that we were looking for. The only database that had anything close was the statistics department of the Vietnamese Government – GSO, Vietnam. This office conducted monthly surveys of a wide range of data and a detailed census once every 5 years.

However this data again suffered from some of the problems that we were trying to overcome – it was disjointed making it impossible to run even slightly complex queries. We decided that GSO, Vietnam woud be our starting point and we would work with them to plug the holes.

Our next step was to create a high level datastructure which would form the basis of the analyses that we wanted to let the user perform. In order to make analyzeVietnam really flexible this data structure would have to facilitate conditional data fetches using all possible permutations and combinations of the various data parameters. Once we had our database design pasted on the wall we started filling it with the available data. The gaping holes were immediately apparent.

It was time to approach GSO. Over the next few months we worked with statisticians and made sure that the data added up – top down and bottom up and that this data was consistent with those published by international bodies.

While the data from GSO formed the crux of our website you will find in analyzeVietnam a rich collection of data from other sources as well as interesting articles, photographs and business templates