Vladimirova Alina

Statistics of Foreign Trade of the Countries of Southeast Asia: the Problem of Data Integrity through the API

ЮГО-ВОСТОЧНАЯ АЗИЯ: АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ РАЗВИТИЯ, 2018, №3(40), 71-83

 
Annotation: Development of information technologies and data analysis lead researches to new challenges including formidable questions on quality of data which volumes are growing rapidly. In this paper, we demonstrate several important features of getting access to data using application programming interfaces (API). In recent years, APIs have become very common, however, scientists are still often insufficiently familiar with principles of their work. Meanwhile, the monitoring we conducted in May 2018 shows that even an official API of such a reputable organization as the UN can’t guarantee the integrity of the information received. Thus, we discuss problems that may arise when scholars work with the “UN Comtrade” database and provide several practical recommendations for downloading data from APIs, which are useful to specialists on Asia and other regions.

Keywords: International trade, data quality assessment, application programming interfaces, API, information integrity, missing data, time series, big data, UN, Southeast Asia