Data Integration and Dissemination (DIaD)

Title

Data Integration and Dissemination

Acronym

DIaD

Duration

April 2008 - July 2009

Website

Data Integration and Dissemination (DIaD) Website

Summary

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.

Project Deliverables

A GDAS web service delivering 2001 Aggregate Census Statistics
A GDAS web service delivering NSPD data
A GLS web service for the 2001 Aggregate Census Statistics GDAS with UKBORDERS boundary data and the NSPD GDAS
A WPS web service providing post-linkage data transformations, specifically cartogram production and Bittorrent metadata
Client interfaces that demonstrate the consumption of the various web services and provide end users with the capacity to find, request and access the various census datasets delivered via the web services
A private p2p file sharing network for the delivery of census data
An evaluation summary of the utility and issues related to such a mechanism for census data delivery
A summative report covering issues, strengths and weaknesses of the approaches adopted with recommendations on potential applicability both within and beyond the Census Programme

EDINA Contact

James Reid

Funders

ESRC