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

2. “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)

3. “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)

4. CONTENT The Essence of the Net TODAY VISION Politics Culture etc
Economy
Privacy
social science data services

5. 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.

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

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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.

12. “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)

13. 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

14. “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.

15. 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.

16. CESSDA RI: THE GOAL The Essence of the Net TODAY VISION
social science data services

17. Vigdis Kvalheim Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) www. nsd
Vigdis Kvalheim Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD)