ASSDA Services for e-Social Science

ASeSS

The Australian Social Science Data Archive (ASSDA) provides online access to over 1000 social science data sets, including census data, surveys and opinion polls.

Much of the high-value data that researchers want to access for secondary analysis has ethics and confidentiality requirements and these prevent the adoption of an open data commons approach. Thus a major challenge for ASSDA is the need to balance access and data analysis with assurance of confidentiality, without requiring labour intensive processes.

The project will develop web-based services for authenticated on-line data analysis, including cross-archive search, textual analysis, spatial data analysis, computational analysis, modelling and visualization. The data analysis tools will support the unlocking of otherwise inaccessible data sets of national significance, and enable groups of researchers to form ad-hoc groups to work together on a data set and problem, and to focus on analysis rather than development of analysis tools. The project will also develop data curation tools that will enable much lower cost acquisition of social science data.

Available documents include:

• ASeSS proforma - agreed by NeAT (February 2008)

• ASeSS business plan summary - reviewed by AeRIC (May 2008)

• ASeSS project plan - under development