ISTAT I.Stat Istituto Nazionale di Statistica

History and Background

The Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (Istat) is Italy's national statistics institute, founded in 1926 under the leadership of statistician Corrado Gini. From its earliest days, Istat coordinated Italy's previously fragmented statistical activities, producing the Italian Statistical Yearbook and conducting the national population census. The institute adopted its current name and gained scientific and financial autonomy under Legislative Decree 322 of September 1989, which also established the National Statistical System (Sistan). Istat's website launched in 1996, and the institute has been a pioneer in open data for Italy.

I.Stat Data Warehouse and APIs

In 2010, Istat released I.Stat, its corporate data warehouse, offering a comprehensive and homogeneous repository of Italian official statistics. I.Stat is accessible at dati.istat.it and organized thematically, with multidimensional data tables covering demographics, economics, labor, health, education, environment, and more. Istat also provides an endpoint for machine-to-machine data access, and a new successor data browser is gradually being developed with interactive graphs, maps, and dashboards.

Collections and Data Holdings

Istat is the largest producer of open data in Italy. Its holdings include census data from 1951 onwards (down to sub-municipal level), household income and expenditure surveys, labor force surveys, national accounts, consumer price indices, agricultural censuses, industry and services censuses, and more than 1,500 time series in 22 thematic areas. The Istat library, established in 1926, is open to the public and holds approximately 400,000 volumes.

Access and Usage

All Istat data is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licensing, allowing free reuse including for commercial purposes with source attribution. The data warehouse can be queried and downloaded at no charge. An SDMX-compliant web service endpoint enables programmatic access for integration into third-party applications and research workflows.