The Picasso project

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

Picasso, a three-year project, will be deployed into production in Summer 2018. It replaces a variety of local tools and processes with a enterprise hub for managing metadata for surveys, administrative files and record linkage projects; a data service centre function for 'fit for use' data files; and enterprise search and discovery using metadata to facilitate reuse of information. 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. DDI enables efficient sharing of metadata stored in Picasso with external users through the cross-country network of Research Data Centres.