Data Integration and Dissemination
DIaD
April 2008 - July 2009
Data Integration and Dissemination (DIaD) Website
The ESRC Census Programme funded twelve-month project, Data Integration and Dissemination (DIaD), investigated the potential of using international open standards based techniques to perform data linkage between two of the most heavily used census outputs – the aggregate statistical data and the output geographies.
The primary objective of this work was to develop a data dissemination model which demonstrates a more generic capability – that of ‘geo-linking’. This provided the ability to separate census statistical data (for example, but other geospatially-linked data are equally capable of utilising this approach) and the boundary (geometry) data to which it related. Geo-linking allowed for distributed, multi-source datasets to be seamlessly linked in a fashion that facilitated data separation for management and administration purposes. In essence, the approach provided an extensible infrastructure applicable not only to the immediate needs of the Census Programme but also more widely to broader requirements emerging from the e-Social Science programme, especially its e-Infrastructure strand and also the ESRCs national data strategy.
Additionally, using the same standards based approach, the project aimed to demonstrate how further value added processing can be invoked by transforming the geo-linked outputs through a series of ancillary web processing services.