About eolas

Why we built this

If you've ever needed a Stats NZ time series for a model or a dashboard, you know the routine: figure out which API is the current one (hint: not the one Google sends you to), reverse-engineer the SDMX query format, handle the YYYYMM period quirk, deal with redirects, then write the same boilerplate next time you need a different dataset.

Every NZ data source has its own version of this — Stats NZ uses SDMX, RBNZ publishes XLSX, NZTA exposes ArcGIS REST, LINZ has its own Koordinates platform, MBIE attaches Excel files to web pages. Each is fine on its own. Together, they waste a lot of people's time.

eolas is one REST API that wraps all of them. Pull rbnz_b1_exchange_rates_monthly the same way you pull a Stats NZ Geospatial polygon or an MSD benefit-rate breakdown. You get a data frame back.

Who's behind it

Phil Donovan — economist and data engineer, and the developer behind eolas. He builds and runs it through his own company, Virtus Solutions (Auckland, New Zealand), and consults on data architecture, engineering, and analysis.

eolas started as in-house infrastructure for consulting projects — the same datasets kept coming up, the same scraping scripts kept needing maintenance, and clients kept asking "can you just give me the data?" So I opened it up as a public API.

How we work

• Licence on every table. Every dataset is public data with its licence recorded. Most NZ sources are CC BY 4.0. Some have their own terms, such as the OECD series and the Charities Register, and we follow them (see Terms §5). We attribute where attribution is required (see each dataset page).
• Kept fresh. Each pipeline runs on a schedule that matches its source: daily for RBNZ exchange rates and LINZ parcels, weekly for Stats NZ, the OECD and Treasury, and monthly for most councils. The status page shows the last run.
• Open formats, no lock-in. Data is stored as open Iceberg and Parquet tables in AWS Sydney, with an optional Snowflake share for Enterprise. You can take it with you.
• Automated. Pipelines run on a schedule and alert us when they fail.

Where the data comes from

We don't generate any of the underlying data — we just make it easier to use. The sources we pull from, alphabetically:

• · ACC
• · Education Counts
• · LINZ
• · MBIE
• · MSD
• · NZ Police / MoJ
• · NZ Treasury
• · OECD
• · RBNZ
• · Stats NZ
• · Waka Kotahi (NZTA)
• · WorkSafe NZ
• · Auckland Council
• · Department of Conservation

Want a source we don't cover yet? Let us know.

Trust & security

If you're evaluating eolas for a production workload or are doing procurement diligence, our security & trust page covers data lineage, hosting, uptime, and incident response.