Centralised management of reference metadata and its application

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Seljak, Rudi^* | Steenvoorden, Tina

Affiliations: Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Rudi Seljak, Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, Litostrojska 54, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. Tel.: +386 1 241 52 94; E-mail: rudi.seljak@gov.si.

Abstract: The Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia (SURS) has a long tradition of producing and using standardized reference and quality-related metadata. Most of the surveys have to collect, analyse and disseminate this kind of information and a lot of this information is made available to different (internal and external) users. The workload became burdensome and inefficient, since this information was scattered around in different locations and in different forms, which significantly reduced its analytical power. Therefore, SURS started to develop a new, multipurpose application that would enable easier and more effective usage of reference metadata produced through the statistical process and would support the evaluation phase of our statistical business model. The basic methodological fundaments that we have been building upon are presented in the paper. The paper describes the individual steps in the design of the application, details on the functionalities of the application and points out main challenges that we met during the development.

Keywords: Multipurpose application, quality indicators, quality reporting, metadata, standardization

DOI: 10.3233/SJI-210812

Journal: Statistical Journal of the IAOS, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 1207-1219, 2021