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The International Labour Organization, or ILO, was founded in 1919 and became the first specialised agency of the UN in 1946. The ILO promotes rights at work, encourages decent employment opportunities, enhances social protection and strengthens dialogue on work-related issues.
The ILO Department of Statistics provides users within and outside the ILO with relevant, timely and reliable labour statistics. Their activities include: gathering and disseminating labour statistics; setting international standards for labour statistics; and providing technical cooperation, assistance and training in labour statistics.
The ILO manages a large quantity of valuable statistical information that can be difficult to collect, process and display. High costs, comparability issues among countries, and the need to revamp data dissemination were some of the reasons that drove ILO to streamline processes and find a new solution to digitalise and make statistics accessible.
Manage the huge amount of statistical data and metadata.
Propose a solution easily maintainable by business users.
Support multi-channel statistics distribution: B2B, B2C.
Multiple data formats: documents, statistic tables, charts, dynamic tables...
To address the ILO’s requirements, we proposed a modular solution based on three components.
The main entry point is a web portal built with Oracle WebCenter Portal using a custom business layer: https://www.ilo.org/ilostat. With its runtime editing mode, business users easily change the page content, layout or directly construct a new page using a list of components. Business requirements implied development of a library of ADF custom components.
Based on our business layer, we developed a RESTful API to display statistical data in a standard for the exchange of statistical information, called SDMX.
The latest requirement was to provide easy access to country-level data for any device including mobile, so we developed an application using Sencha: https://www.ilo.org/ilostatcp/CPDesktop/.
To ensure a strategy of greatest reusability, we based this application on our SMDX RESTful API. This web application was packaged as a mobile application for iOS and Android and is available from their online webstore.
We suggested using the WebCenter browser-based runtime editing tool called Web Composer. It lets business users manage their website’s evolution without needing advanced development knowledge (although basic knowledge of HTML is helpful).
To ensure WebComposer would be used, and to let users manage content pages with statistical content, we specifically developed custom WebCenter components. These components have been added to the list of WebCenter components and can be used in a new page as well as in a future new application.
Statistical data are available for anyone, from student to a researcher, but they do not all have the same needs. To satisfy these different profiles, statistical data can be exported in three formats: Excel, CSV or SDMX. Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) is an initiative to foster standards for the exchange of statistical information.
Statistical needs are varied and differ greatly from country to country. We developed a download page that allows users to customise queries and get specific data in their preferred format.
To simplify and popularise access to labour data, we developed a mobile application. It is based on the SDMX query tool and provides easy access to country-level data for labour market indicators from the ILO.
