Abstract
There is a growing demand for more cost-efficient production processes in Statistical Institutes. One way to address this need is to equip Statistical Information Systems (SIS) with the ability to automatically produce statistical data and metadata of high quality and deliver them to the user via the Internet. Current approaches, although provide for the storage of appropriate metadata, do not use process metadata for guiding the production process. In this paper we present an approach on creating SISs that permits metadata-guided statistical processing based on an object-based, statistical metadata model. The model is not domain specific and can accommodate both microdata and macrodata. We have equipped the model with a set of transformations that can be used to automatically manipulate data and metadata. We show the applicability of transformations with some examples using actual statistical data for R&D expenditures. Finally, we demonstrate how the presented framework can be exploited for the construction of a web site that offers ad hoc query capabilities to the users of statistical data.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
ADDSIA EUROSTAT project (1998). http://www.ed.ac.uk/~addsia.
Bretherton, Francis P. and Hibbard,William L. (1997). Metadata: A Case Study from the Environmental Sciences. In Proc. Tenth Int. Conf. Scientific and Statistical Database Management, Capri, Italy (pp. 166-172).
Eurostat (1993). Statistical Meta Information Systems. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Community.
Eurostat (1996). Research and Development, Annual Statistics 1996. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Community.
Eurostat (1997a). Development Of Statistical Information Systems (DOSIS). Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Community.
Eurostat (1997b). Eurostat Databases, New Cronos 11/1997, CD-ROM version with CUB.X software. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Community.
Eurostat (1998). Design of an Integrated Statistical Metainformation System and Creation of a CD-ROM on Metadata for Use in National Statistical Offices, SUP-COM 1998/LOT 14.
Froeschl, K.A. (1997). Metadata Management in Statistical Information Processing, Wien: Springer.
Petit Gérald, Beziz Pierre, and van Eck, Rob. (1996). OECD Directorate. List of Metadata Items for OECD'sMain Economic Indicators, Statistical Commission and Economic Commission for Europe, Conference of European Statisticians.
Ghosh, S.P. (1986). Statistical Relational Tables for Statistical Database Management. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 12, 1106-1116.
Ghosh, S.P. (1988). Statistics Metadata. In S.Kotz, N.L. Johnson, and C.B. Read (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences Vol. 8 (pp. 743-746) NewYork: John Wiley.
Grossmann, W. (1999). Metadata. In S. Kotz (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences, Vol. 3 (updated) (pp. 811-815). New York: John Wiley.
Grossmann, W. and Papageorgiou, H. (1997). Data and Metadata Representation of Highly Aggregated Economic Time-Series. In Proc. of the 51st Session Int. Statistical Institute, Contributed Papers, Book 2 (pp. 485-486).
Hatzopoulos, M., Karali, I., and Viglas, E. (1998). Attacking Diversity in NSIs' Storage Infrastucture: The ADDSIA Approach. In Pre-Proceeding of International Seminar on New Techniques and Technologies in Statistics' 98, Italy (pp. 229-234).
IDARESA EUROSTAT Project (1998). http://idaresa.univie.ac.at.
IPIS IST Project (2000). http://www.instore.gr/ipis.
Kafatos Menas, Wang X. Sean, Li Zuotao, Yang Ruixin, and Ziskin Dan (1998). Information Technology Implementation for a Distributed Data System Serving Earth Scientists: Seasonal to Interannual ESIP. In Proc. Tenth International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, Capri, Italy (pp. 210-215).
Karge, R. (1998). Integrated Metadata-Systems within Statistical Offices. In Proc. Tenth International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, Capri, Italy (pp. 216-219).
Kent, J-P. and Schuerhoff, M. (1997). Some Thoughts About a Metadata Management System. In Proc. Ninth International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, Olympia, Washington (pp. 174-185).
Lamb, J. (1998). National Statistical Offices and Administrations, and the Web: A Survey. Research in Official Statistics, 1(1), 121-130.
Lenz, H.-J. and Shoshani, A. (1997). Summarizability in OLAP and Statistical Databases. In Proc. Ninth International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, Olympia, Washington (pp. 132-143).
Malvestuto, F.M. (1993). A Universal-Schema Approach to Statistical Databases Containing Homogeneous Summary Tables. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 18, 678-708.
METANET EUROSTAT Project (2001). http://www.epros.ed.ac.uk/metanet.
MISSION EUROSTAT Project (2001). http://www.epros.ed.ac.uk/mission.
OMG (1999). OMG Unified Language Specification. Object Management Group (OMG) Inc., available at http://www.omg.org.
Ozsoyoglu, G. and Ozsoyoglu, Z.M. (1985). Statistical Database Query Languages. IEEE Trans. On Software Engineering, Se-11-10.
Ozsoyoglu, G., Matos, V., and Ozsoyoglu, Z.M. (1989). Query Processing Techniques in the Summary-Table-by-Example Database Query Language. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 14, 526-573.
Papageorgiou, H., Vardaki, M., and Pentaris, F. (2000a). Recent Advances on Metadata. Computational Statistics, 15(1), 89-97.
Papageorgiou, H., Vardaki, M., and Pentaris, F. (2000b). Quality of Statistical Metadata. Research in Official Statistics, 2(1), 45-57.
Papageorgiou, H., Vardaki, M., and Pentaris, F. (2000c). Data and Metadata Transformations. Research in Official Statistics, 3(2), 27-43.
Shoshani, Arie (1997). OLAP and Statistical Databases: Similarities and Differences. In Proc. Sixteenth ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), May 12-14, Tucson, Arizona (pp. 185-186).
Sundgren, B. (1991). What Metainformation Should Accompany Statistical Macrodata?. Statistics Sweden R&D Report, 1991:9.
Sundgren, B. (1996). Making Statistical Data More Available. International Statistical Review, 64, 23-38.
United Nations, (1995). Guidelines for the Modeling of Statistical Data and Metadata. In Proc. Conf. European Statisticians of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE), Geneva.
Westlake, Andrew (1997). A Simple Structure for Statistical Meta-Data. In Proc. Tenth Int. Conf. Scientific and Statistical Database Management, Olympia, Washington (pp. 186-195).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Papageorgiou, H., Pentaris, F., Theodorou, E. et al. A Statistical Metadata Model for Simultaneous Manipulation of both Data and Metadata. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 17, 169–192 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012805713392
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012805713392