Abstract

On behalf of Thomas Schulz, head of the Publishing and Dissemination Section, Federal Statistical Office (FSO)
Strand 1 - New sources and tools for effectiveness: AI and Machine Learning in Statistics

The Swiss Federal Statistical Office has been online for 30 years now with its main website www.statistics.admin.ch. The site, which exists in five languages and contains over 10,000 pages today, has been updated in terms of content and technology at regular intervals of five to ten years. Two years ago, FSO received the short-term mandate from the Federal Government to migrate the whole website to a completely new technology by the end of 2026, as the current official software will not be supported anymore and will be merged into a new government standard. This outlook presented the responsible staff with significant, almost insurmountable challenges, not only in the dissemination unit, but in the office in general – not only due to the generally limited given resources and the non-negotiable sharp deadlines and framework.

Given the short timeframe and the amount of content and various applications running on the current website, it was clear from the outset that we could not approach this migration in the same way as previous web projects (e.g. in 2015), but would have to develop a new, agile approach, using AI technologies, in order to have a realistic chance to continue to be online with our information offer after January 1, 2027. Against this backdrop, the New User Experience (NUX) project was started, which we will briefly introduce here. Apart from technical aspects of the migration into new systems (e.g. the integration of existing data cubes, visualisations, publications, etc.), the focus here shall be primarily on the overarching goals of reducing, restructuring, finding and automatically generating content as much as possible – while at the same time knowing and meeting completely new user needs and transforming the website into a resource not only for SEO, but increasingly for the news of the AI world.