The price statistics team at ESCWA conducted an online national workshop to Egypt for complementing price statistics with big data tools using web scraping.
The price statistics team at ESCWA has been exploring new tools to enhance price statistics in the Arab Region by using technology to complement traditional data collection methods. This initiative aims at increasing data collection frequency, preserving the continuous supply of data, while also reducing the effort of manual data collection.
A training workshop on price web scraping from major online outlets was conducted for the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) - Egypt to train the national team and develop their skills in web scraping to be utilized in conjunction with the traditional data collection process for CPI and ICP purposes.
The training was attended by 3 participants from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) - Egypt and focused on:
- Discussing the potential uses, benefits, and the common challenges of Big Data and non-traditional data collection methods such as scanner data and web scraping.
- Demonstrating web scraping of price data from national online outlets for various products categories.
- Introducing the participants on coding and writing the web scraping scripts in Python language to maintain the scripts according to the nature of each online outlet.
United Nations Conference Centre, Bangkok, Thailand
