Norwegian Social Science Data Services The Essence of the Net Vigdis Kvalheim Associate Director Norwegian Social Science Data Services IASSIST 2007 - Montreal

“Data is the single most important component for a science based understanding of society. To promote and facilitate access to these data is to promote research” (CESSDA-PPP, 2007)

“Preservation was once an obscure background operation of interest chiefly to conservators and archivists. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important elements of a functional cyberinfrastructure.” (ATKIN’s Report)

CONTENT The Essence of the Net TODAY VISION Politics Culture etc Economy Privacy copyright@norwegian social science data services

Data Explosion Increased capabilities to match complex data from different sources and carry out advanced studies using sophisticated methods and analytic tools. However, Increased capabilities does nor automatically mean increased research possibilities.

Major barriers to comparative research Intitutional and legal bottlenecks Technical bottlenecks Financial impediments Linguistics impediments Data quality Documentation Knowledge

Major barriers to comparative research The ATKIN’s report on Cyberinfrastructure, the OECD Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Public Funding, the ESFRI report (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) It is not primarily tools and technologies but people and policies, human resources, information resources and capital resources that hamper the success of existing infrastructures and their contribution to the production of more truly comparative research on a wide range of high quality truly European data.

Climbing the mountains… Institutional politics, the legal and cultural context do affect opportunities for national as well as cross national empirical research Ethical Data protection Legal Practical Data dissemination

Climbing the mountains… The European Context – Diversity inspite of strong committment to harmonisation, supported by legislation to ensure harmonised data protection and data dissemination policy and practice. Diversity in national interpretation of dataprotection legislation Diversity of content and quality of data within archives Diverse access and licence agreements for data

Climbing the mountains… Develop CESSDA into robust European wide institutional framework that encourages wider and more data usage and thereby increasing the volume of high quality cross national comparative This calls for organisational change: Establishing CESSDA as a formal organisation on sound financial and legal footing. Introducing formal hierarchy and division of labour and powers within an exciting network of equal partners. Strengthening and widening Ensuring national trust and negotiating national support

Climbing the mountains… Country-by-country audit of access arrangements for national statistical data Audit of national statistical dislosure arrangements Posistion CESSDA RI’s as central data ”brokers” – negotiating European-wide data access agreements Establish harmonised systems and legal bases for the aquisition and sharing of data across borders.

“It is the agreements about standards and social conventions that enable the various component of a distributed infrastructure, to work together and expand its research and scope”. (the Atkin’s report)  

DDI CESSDA RI: Evaluate DDI 3.0 as the basis for a large-scale documentation and portal software upgrade, including the upgrade of NESSTAR to support DDI 3.0  

“Schengen agreement” for data access CESSDA RI: Evaluate middleware for a common federated access, authentication and authorisation system, where user’s credentials must be supplied only once.

Climbing the mountains… Investigate how a Statistical Disclosure Control (DSC) module can be integrated into the upgraded CESSDA RI and implement a prototype in the PPP.

CESSDA RI: THE GOAL The Essence of the Net TODAY VISION copyright@norwegian social science data services

Vigdis Kvalheim Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) www. nsd Vigdis Kvalheim Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) www.nsd.uib.no/english vigdis.kvalheim@nsd.uib.no