Metadata Management in Statistical Information Processing

As the integration of statistical data collected in various subject matter domains becomes more and more important in several socio-economic investigation areas, the management of so-called metadata - a formal digital processing of information about data - gains increasing relevance. Unlike current information technologies (such as database systems, and computer networks) facilitating merely the technical side of data collation, a coherent integration of empirical data still remains cumbersome, and thus rather costly, very often because of a lack of powerful semantic data models capturing the very meaning and structure of statistical data sets. Recognizing this deficiency, this work proposes a general framework for the computer-aided integration and harmonization of distributed heterogeneous statistical data sources, aiming at a comprehensive statistical meta-information system.