Data Integration in Official Statistics – Collaborating for Success

Jenine Borowik
Australian Bureau of Statistics

Integrating different types of data effectively has the potential to provide more timely and more detailed statistics and new official statistics for new data needs at both the national and international level.

Official statistics organisations are challenged by the capacities needed to incorporate new data sources in their statistical production process while at the same time companies have appeared exploiting these new sources to provide alternative statistics.

The High Level Group for the Modernisation of Official Statistics (HLG MOS) has recognised the need to rapidly improve the capacity of official statistics organisations to integrate different data sources effectively. The HLG MOS initiated the Modernstats Data integration Project, a collaboration of more than 10 countries from across the world to work together on practical steps for this endeavour.

This presentation will outline the approach and results to date, including experiments done, challenges, opportunities, methods and architectures as well as plans for further work.

With the enormous range of potential data sources and associated methods and issues, working together is an important way to speed up the modernisation of official statistics.