DATE Making Sense of the Census: One Year On with the CAIRD Project Rob Dymond Mimas Development Officer Census Dissemination Unit Mimas University of Manchester
Introduction Census Dissemination Unit (CDU) Mimas The University of Manchester Funded by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) - Census Programme
What is CAIRD? C ensus A ggregate I nformation R esource D emonstrator
Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange (SDMX) - standard way to describe and exchange aggregate data and metadata Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) - standard for documentation of social science data
CAIRD: The good… Working prototype application
CAIRD: The good… The web service creates a gateway for people to access the data or customise their access to it Database Web service Web application
CAIRD: The good… Very Large Mega Cube * potential data items 309,253,650 populated data items Extremely sparsely populated
CAIRD: The good… SDMX/DDI hybrid Influencing agencies
CAIRD: The bad… Finding examples of similar work Keeping to the standards
CAIRD: The bad… Extracting the metadata from the published aggregate data tables Cell: 0069 Sex: Male General Health: Good Health and Fairly Good Health Limiting Long- Term Illness: No Limiting Long- Term Illness
CAIRD: The ugly… Traditional approaches: the fixed cross tab
CAIRD: The ugly… Divorced data What does this actually mean?