Reusable Solution for the Dissemination of Statistics

Definition

Dissemination means the activity of making statistics and statistical analysis accessible to users.

The reusable solution for the dissemination of statistics is addressing needs in

• The dissemination of statistical products,
• Simplifying the processes for the dissemination of statistics,
• Reducing technical interoperability barriers encountered by data consumers in accessing disseminated statistics.

The solution consists of:

Owner

The Reusable Solution for the Dissemination of Statistics is published by Eurostat under the EUPL license.

Intended audience

The Reusable Solution for the Dissemination of Statistics is intended for all organisations issuing statistical data and that would like to disseminate these.

Long description

The Reusable Solution for the Dissemination of Statistics is based on the SDMX information model.

The Reusable Solution for the Dissemination of Statistics is composed of main parts:

• The Data Browser is dedicated to end-users for getting access to the disseminated statistics (in read-only mode). The Data Browser support a navigation tree for the categorisation of disseminated data, and visualisations (tables view, charts, maps) for each disseminated data,
• The API supports machine-to-machine data and metadata delivery,
• The Administration Interface, which is restricted to the administrator, allows maintaining both the navigation tree and the data content to be disseminated.

The API for machine-to-machine interactions exposes endpoints for different purposes:

• CATALOGUE endpoint, which is used for data discovery,
• SDMX 2.1 endpoint, used for synchronous metadata and data queries,
• ASYNC endpoint, used for asynchronous data delivery.

The Data Browser is the web interface to consult and download all disseminated statistical content. Data is categorised in a navigation tree, each data can be consulted by means of visualisations such as table view, line and bar charts, maps and times series table. A download facility supports multiple manual combined download options.

The Administration Interface supports the management of content over three main containers called ‘STAGING’, ‘PREVIEW’ and ‘LIVE’:

• The purpose of STAGING is to organise how data to be disseminated is categorised in a navigation tree.
• The purpose of PREVIEW is to consult content as it will be made available to public data consumers i.e. end-users. PREVIEW contains data under embargo, and is visible only to content administrators. At this stage of the process, data and metadata are not publicly released.
• The purpose of LIVE is to disseminate latest data and metadata publicly to end-users i.e. LIVE means that the data is publicly available.

Technologies

For the back end :

• REST & SOAP web services,
• Weblogic Application Server,
• Oracle relational database system.

For the front end :

• HTML/HTML5,
• CSS,
• JavaScript,
• AngularJS,
• Vega library for visualisations,
• jQuery,
• Java,
• JAX-RS.

The Reusable Solution for the Dissemination of Statistics requires an IT hosting infrastructure of professional grade, with load balancing between multiple servers.

7. History / Key milestones

The first version of the Reusable Solution for the Dissemination of Statistics is

• issued in 2019
• provided for evaluation by the Join Up community and target audience, and
• updated on ad-hoc basis by Eurostat.