I spoke at the bi-annual OECD conference in Istanbul last week. One of the big themes of the conference was what policies and products to use to fully leverage all of the official government economic, social and environmental data that flows into the organization. At the end of the conference the Istanbul Declaration was signed, calling for member countries to make their official governmental data available online as a public good.

Among various ideas under study, the OECD is thinking of creating an Internet site based on Web 2.0 “wiki” technologies for the presentation and discussion of international, national and local initiatives aimed at developing indicators of societal progress. By making indicators accessible to citizens all over the world through dynamic graphics and other analytical tools, this initiative would aim to stimulate discussion based on solid and comparable statistical information about what progress actually means.

Silicon Valley data visualization and modeling startup Swivel attended, as did other startups addressing these needs like IBM (see their Many Eyes data visualization product).

As a representative of the “new Internet,” I was definitely the black sheep of the conference. I was perhaps the only attendee not in a suit and tie (it was 100 degrees outside), and my Macbook Pro drew stares from this Windows-only mostly-government crowd. But they were genuinely interested in the evolution of the web and the open data approach to most new startups, and how to leverage that to get government data into the hands of economists and others as efficiently as possible.

Swivel has a huge head start in being the de-facto depository for official OECD data. The OECD is already an “offical source” on swivel via a deal done in the Spring, and hosts a lot of OECD data on its site already.

In addition to their official relationship with the OECD, Swivel does modeling in addition to the visualization tools offered by IBM and others gunning for the business (see our original post on Swivel during their beta). Freebase is another natural choice to deposit this kind of date. Whatever happens, the goal of distributing this kind of statistical data more broadly is a noble one. I hope it happens soon.

See Jesse Robbins’ coverage of the event as well over at O’Reilly Radar (he’s an advisor to Swivel and attended on their dime). My photos from the trip are here.

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Swivel, the new Minor Ventures startup that we wrote about yesterday, is now live. Go compare the increase in U.S. wine consumption to the the drop in crime, or see how extreme temperature fluctuations (in Fresno) equal big profits for electricity utilities.

I already see a lot of fairly useless data included on the site, which makes the good stuff harder to find. As the active community grows the better data will hopefully rise to the top via the rating and feedback system. This is one of the freshest ideas we’ve seen in months - we’ll be tracking them closely.

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Swivel Co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as “YouTube for Data.” That’s a good start for someone trying to understand it, because the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually. The number of page views your website generates. Or a stock price over time. Weather data. Commodity prices. The number of Bald Eagles in Washington state. Whatever. Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmared by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data.

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.

And better yet, Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed.

Academic types are going to go nuts over this. I spent a summer in college running regression analysis models on economic data. Being able to simply upload data to Swivel and then begin to slice and dice the data would have saved a lot of time. And being able to compare our data to what others were doing in related fields could have yielded results that we would never have aimed for. Big companies, small companies, thinktanks and non-classified government organizations are going to be similarly dazzled.

Swivel is putting significant computing power behind the scenes to run the data analysis. “We use farms of powerful computers and algorithms at the Swivel data centers to transform a lonely grid of numbers and letters into hundreds - sometimes thousands - of graphs that can be explored and compared with any other public data in Swivel.”

Not all data will be public. The companies business model is to provide the service for free for public data, and charge a fee for data that is kept private. Private data can still be compared by the owner to public data sets.

Look for Swivel to launch later this week after a year of quiet development. The company is based in San Francisco and is part of Minor Ventures.

Exclusive screen shots below:

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