Conclusion and Outlook

Abstract

The volume, complexity and importance of data worlds are increasing explosively. For their profitable use, it is crucial to understand the data, master their rapid growth and put them together to new information structures. However, the information technology (IT) industry has invested little in the development of comprehensive data standards so far.

Statistics as an interdisciplinary science has standards for data management, data documentation, data provision, data protection and, last but not least, the data themselves. These standards are available, distributed worldwide, and they work.

The current data orientation and the rapidly growing data volumes are a great opportunity for statistics to emerge as a central information provider and as a generic discipline for “building knowledge through intelligent evaluation of experience manifested in data”. Using this opportunity will be easier with standardisation and SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange).