the-first-tiger / wiesbaden

Client to Access Databases from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (DESTATIS)

The R package wiesbaden provides functions to directly retrieve data from databases maintained by the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (DESTATIS) in Wiesbaden. The package uses the SOAP XML web service from DESTATIS (PDF Documentation).

Access to the following databases is implemented:

• regionalstatistik.de
• genesis.destatis.de
• landesdatenbank.nrw.de
• bildungsmonitoring.de

Note, to access any of the databases using this package, you need to register on the respective website to get a personal login name and password. The registration is free but to access the database genesis.destatis.de you need to register as a premium user (Premium Nutzer, 500 Euro per year). For all other databases, the standard, free user account is sufficient.

Installation

The package has to be installed directly from the Github repository:

library(devtools)
install_github("sumtxt/wiesbaden")

Alternatively, you can also download the package as a zip file, unzip it on your computer and run:

library(devtools)
install_local("PATH/TO/PACKAGE/FOLDER")

Usage

The package helps with retrieving the data cubes which are used to construct the data tables available as csv files via the web application of each database. The data cubes are long format data tables that are much easier to process as compared to the csv files. For details on how to use the package, see the vignette.

The package also helps with importing the German municipality register files via the function read_gv100(). For more information see the help file of this function.

Users that wish to work with the csv files might find the download_csv() and read_header_genesis() in this package helpful. The former can be used to automate downloads and the latter facilitates importing downloaded files. Users might also wish to check the R package destatiscleanr github.com/cutterkom/destatiscleanr.

FAQ

• Does this package work with a proxy? Yes. Set the proxy globally before calling any package command, e.g.:

    set_config(use_proxy("your.proxy", port = 1234, auth = "basic"))
    data <- retrieve_data(...)      
  

• When I try to access the data from genesis.destatis.de I get an error message. What can I do? Different from the other databases, you need to get a premium acccount (see above) to access the raw data (Datenquader).

Similar and Complementary Packages

• The R package destatiscleanr github.com/cutterkom/destatiscleanr provides functions to help importing csv files downloaded via the web application.

• The R package AGS github.com/sumtxt/ags provides functions to work with the Amtlicher Gemeindeschlüssel (AGS), e.g. to extract the Bundesland using get_bundesland().

• The Python packages github.com/WZBSocialScienceCenter/gemeindeverzeichnis and rohablog.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/gv100-parser-python/ provide functions to read the GV100 format.

• The node.js package https://github.com/yetzt/node-gv100json provides functions to read the GV100 format.

• The Python package github.com/pudo/regenesis provides a function to bulk download data from regionalstatistik.de.