Bill Bradley, Jostein Ryssevik, Simon Musgrave, Prem Khosla
WebDAIS/DDMS - A new version of NESSTAR

Demonstration and Discussion

bbradley@hc-sc.gc.ca

As reported at last year's IASSIST, a project is underway to combine DDMS/DAIS and NESSTAR.

The Data Dictionary Management System (DDMS) was a precursor to the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), and has been in use since the 1980's by Health Canada and Canadian data suppliers to create standardized machine readable metadata using DDI-like descriptors and structures. The resulting metabase enables DAIS, the Data and Information System, a desktop platform that is used widely across Health Canada to strengthen the analytical underpinnings for decision making and action in health. DAIS provides access to thousands of data items and questions from Canadian health, social and economic databases, surveys, and polls. Included also are associated tables, reports and indicators, and capabilities for full drill up/drill down through data, information and knowledge products of this nature.

NESSTAR is a more recently designed suite of tools for publishing and accessing micro data through the DDI standard. It provides access on the web to selected data resources from several archives in Europe. NESSTAR's standards-based methods and distributed server architecture are ideal for data and information sharing in the health and social policy domain, which involve cooperation and partnerships amongst many interdependent organizations in different sectors and jurisdictions at local, regional, national and international levels.

The approach is to combine and build on proven investments that exploit and reinforce metadata standardization for improved management and delivery in national and international information systems. The goals are to improve the availability of evidence-based knowledge for decision making and accountability in government, and by doing so to get the 'metadata matters' message (Bradley et al, 1993) across to data users and producers in official statistical systems world-wide, including public opinion polling organizations. The core message is that data must be documented once and properly at source using the new international meta data standards to permit rapid exploitation and knowledge delivery for end users.

The poster presentation will demonstrate these new products, which are being created for Health Canada by AJJA Information Technology Consultants Ltd. of Ottawa in partnership with Nesstar Ltd. of the United Kingdom and Norway. The paper discusses some of the recent enhancements which have been made to NESSTAR/FASTER technology, including:

• addition of tables, fact sheets, research reports and publications, with full 'drill-up/drill-down' to underlying micro data resources.

• a data model and relational data base schema for the DDI, implemented using NESSTAR's distributed server methodology.

• extended browsing, book marking and searching capabilities, fully integrated across variables, data sets, tables, indicators, research reports and publications.

• robust security capabilities for the protection of proprietary or sensitive resources, with levels of trust when completed on a par with electronic banking systems

• a non-proprietary DDI metadata creation, importing and management tool based on the DDMS model, with importing from and exporting to common statistical packages, print and electronic codebook publishing formats;

• significant progress on harmonization of the DDI with ISO 11179, by means of which compliant data producers, libraries and archives can become accredited ISO registries.