Using linked metadata and quality standards for the documentation of Insee's statistical operations

Insee publishes on its web site documentation about the statistical operations that it conducts. Behind the scenes, an important effort has been made recently to break down these texts into precise, well-defined and harmonized items. For this, we leveraged a standard used in the European Statistical System for quality reporting: the SIMS model (Single Integrated Metadata Structure). We actually structured and refined the SIMS by translating it to OWL/RDF, adding a few attributes and specifying more rigorous data types (for example, a contact organization would be an organization object instead of just descriptive text).

Splitting operation descriptions into the SIMS layout required some initial work from the subject-matter statisticians, but it will greatly simplify future regulatory quality reporting. Also, publishing documentations as RDF will allow to integrate them into a global metadata information system and link them to concepts, codes, organization schemes, the product catalogue, etc. RDF maximizes usability and machine-actionability, so it is possible to offer a variety of dissemination formats: a dedicated API, exports as office documents or SDMX metadata reports ready to send to Eurostat, etc.

This will greatly improve and accessibility of our metadata, discoverability of our products and comparability at the national and European levels.

Recorded version of the whole session: https://youtu.be/JapYkShg6q0