Modernizing Official Statistics with Big Data: A Case on PODES

This study serves as an example of how Indonesia can improve its official data by using big data. In this case, we compare village potential data (PODES) published by Statistics Indonesia (BPS) with Google Places API data and ministerial data. We use the number of hospitals, high schools, and public health centers within Jakarta province as the variables. The result shows that despite counting for the same thing, there are discrepancies between all three sources with a varying margin for each variable. We discuss our findings and give suggestions in the hope of improving official data in Indonesia, which could be helped by utilizing big data as this study exemplified.