I just tried to find a second opinion or review about a new restaurant I’d like to go and went therefore across some local recommendation sites.
Qype, the European version of Yelp, was one of them.
One thing on Qype, which I visited for the first time btw, called my immediate attention: the geocode in the address bar, where a 5-digit NUTS code followed by a place name showed up.
NUTS (Nomenclature d’unités territoriales statistiques) is a geocode standard for referencing the administrative division of countries for statistical purposes in Europe. [Wikipedia]
First of all I found it rather fascinating that a trendy 2007 Web 2.0 company, in times of folksonomy and the semantic web, makes use of an old and dusty statistical classification standard developed during the 1980s.
The second thought was already that, since we are dealing a lot with those region codes because it’s the only way to homogenized European statistical information, I can dynamically link our regional databases directly to Qype sites without having to deal with place name, spelling and search accuracy issues.
Considering that option, Qype is probably one of the best resources for a general overview of NUTS regions. Other regional information sites usually provide different, mostly national, views and definitions of regions. Actually I’m not aware of a resource where you can go through all European NUTS regions and get for each a homogenized picture and description.
An amusing detail is that you even can search by NUTS codes instead of place names in Qype: for instance looking up “pizza” in “AT130″. The local search any hardcore statistician ever dreamed of came true in Qype!
The restaurant was I Carusi btw, anybody been there yet?
Big kudos to the guys at Metalab for the Laser Graffiti session last Friday at Mumok here in Vienna.
