scotgov-stats

name	scotgov-stats
description	Query the Scottish Government statistics SPARQL endpoint at statistics.gov.scot — the official Scottish counterpart to ONS data, published as RDF DataCube vocabulary. Use when the question is about Scotland-specific statistics that join cleanly to the sp (Scottish Parliament) facility: economic indicators, demographics, public-sector finance, housing, transport, environment per Scottish council / SPC / Intermediate Zone. Free SPARQL 1.1, no auth. Endpoint sometimes 503s under load; retry with backoff.
license	Open Government Licence v3.0 (Crown copyright; Scottish Government)
metadata	{"facility":"scotgov-stats","cli-alias":"scotstats","base-url":"https://statistics.gov.scot/sparql","provenance":{"tier":3,"operator":"Scottish Government","service":"statistics.gov.scot","upstream-data":"Scottish Government statistics published under the RDF DataCube vocabulary","citation-short":"via statistics.gov.scot SPARQL","citation-formal":"Scottish Government, statistics.gov.scot SPARQL endpoint, retrieved {date}, OGL v3.0","confidence":"authoritative","confidence-notes":"Authoritative for Scottish-Government-published statistics. Endpoint has intermittent availability (503 under load); retries advised. Bulk CSV downloads of the same datasets are available at statistics.gov.scot for resilience."}}

statistics.gov.scot SPARQL

Base URL: https://statistics.gov.scot/sparql. SPARQL 1.1; no auth. Polite User-Agent expected (library sets forgetmenot-scotgov-stats/0.1).

Sister to the wikidata and Parliament sparql facilities — same generic-query pattern, narrower domain (Scottish statistics).

CLI

parl scotstats datasets --take 50
parl scotstats query 'SELECT ?dataset (COUNT(*) AS ?obs) WHERE {
  ?dataset a <http://purl.org/linked-data/cube#DataSet> .
} GROUP BY ?dataset LIMIT 10'
parl scotstats dimensions http://statistics.gov.scot/data/population-estimates-current-geographic-boundaries

Joins to Parliament

• Pair with sp for Scottish-Parliament + Scottish-stats joins: "what's the unemployment rate in this MSP's constituency", "how has X changed under the SNP government".
• Use Wikidata QIDs as a meta-bridge to Westminster members records when an MP was previously an MSP.

Provenance to cite

Tier 3 — third-party (Scottish Government), authoritative.

• Inline cite: "(via statistics.gov.scot)" — once per paragraph.
• For formal output, name the dataset URI you queried.
• Endpoint can be intermittently down (503 reported May 2026); cite the date you pulled the data.
• See ../../docs/provenance.md.