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“Here be standards”: a (very) quick look at StatCan’s metadata vision

Flavio Rizzolo

​

Centre for Statistical and Data Standards

Statistics Canada

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PRESENT

Time-consuming and costly metadata management, for both program areas and IT

    • Siloed repositories
    • Ad-hoc, proprietary, in-house developed tools
    • Limited, time-consuming integration and harmonization
    • Manual processes with large overheads

FUTURE

Semantically integrated data and metadata ecosystem

    • Standards-based repositories
    • Standards-based, off-the-shelf (COTS) and open-source tools
    • Standards-enabled integration and harmonization
    • Standards-driven automation

Labour intensive

Statistics Canada’s transformation context

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DDI-powered data capture

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Towards a standards-based metadata ecosystem

Process...Analyze…Disseminate

DCAT

schema.org

SDTH/L

VTL

DDI-CDI

Metadata are created, used and managed throughout Statistics Canada following established standards to drive business processes

S/XKOS

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How to get there

  • Interoperability
    • Interoperability is not just about the exchange of standardized entities with well-defined structure and semantics. It should also standardize all means of accessing and exchanging those entities.
    • Standards enable interoperability within and across domains, e.g. Social and Economic.
    • Machine-actionable syntax representations, including XML, RDF and JSON-LD, to implement interoperable data solutions and services in practice.
  • Cross-domain integration of multiple standards and tools is key
    • Streamlines data production; processes become repeatable, automatable and auditable
    • Facilitates data integration and usage by improving coherence and comparability across domains
    • DDI is the beginning of the story, but we need complementary standards as well
  • Interoperable data production pipelines have new requirements
    • End-to-end content integration
    • End-to-end provenance and lineage
    • End-to-end change management
    • End-to-end UI (UIs should not be multiplied beyond necessity)

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Thanks!