The Picasso project

Building on Statistics Canada’s metadata-driven architectural principle and metadata strategy themes: drive, make available, structure and manage, Picasso is an enterprise solution for statistical data and metadata management.  Automated business rules will ensure metadata is gathered uniformly, adhering to common architecture, governance and policy instruments.

Final development work of core functionality is underway as the project team prepares to launch Picasso in spring 2018.  The recent adoption of a modernization agenda in Statistics Canada has highlighted the importance of up-to-date metadata in supporting a timely and responsive statistics program, in showing leadership in the stewardship of Canada’s data assets as well as in providing seamless access to data for users.  Picasso promotes the sharing and reuse of data and metadata for all surveys, administrative files and record linkage projects through enterprise search and discovery, documentation of comprehensive metadata including time travel and a data service centre function for ‘fit for use’ data files.  New tools and components include a metadata designer with an entity lifecycle management and registration process.

The solution architecture is based on a hybrid relational/semantic graph (RDF) core registry and repository with a data model driven by standard vocabularies, e.g. SKOS/XKOS, PROV-O, and reference models, e.g. GSIM, DDI 4 and SDMX.  Picasso component and external systems interact with the RDF core via a Data Access Layer and Entity Services to access metadata entities via Common Information Exchange Models. Standard vocabularies and models ensure efficient information exchange internally and to external users through the Agency’s website and Research Data Centres.