Electronic data collection System in CSB of Latvia

1. Electronic data collection System in CSB of Latvia By Karlis Zeila, Vice President, CSB of Latvia IT DG meeting, October 24-25 2005, Eurostat

2. The analysis of classical situation ISDMS – Integrated statistical data management system

3. Questionnaire design using MS Word; Questionnaires printing - resources consuming procedure; Ensuring of the pre-printing process of selected guestionnaires; Sending questionnaires to the respondents by post; All incoming questionnaires have to be registered and reminder letters prepared and sent out to non responded units. Collected data from paper questionnaires has to be retyped into CSB Data Management System, data checking procedures have to be done; More than 120 persons from total of 540 CSB employees ensure timely execution of the processes listed above. Operation with paper questionnaires consists of procedures listed below:

4. Expensiveness of the postal services Data has to be retyped from paper questionnaires The received questionnaires have to be checked and analysed Rather unefficient control and tracing Time and resources consuming process Problems

5. Electronic Data Collection aproaches

6. General requirements EDC System • EDC system should be integrated in the Integrated Statistical Data Management System; • Layout of web forms has to be as much similar to paper questionnaires as it is possible, to ensure simple transition to web based data submission for the respondents; • Functionality of the EDC system particularly on the respondents side has to be very advanced to raise up interest to use it instead of classic paper forms; • All processes have to be metadata driven from common DMS metadata base and automated as much as possible; • The same design tool MS Word for both paper and web forms has to be used

7. Solution

8. Web data collection: • advantages: • for respondent: • the possibility to see, analyze and edit the provided data for the previous periods, • it is possible to enter the data gradually, • it is possible to run validation procedures, • no postal expenses are required. for CSB: • less postal expenses, • no manual data entry required, • increased data quality, because primary data control has already been done by respondent, • flexible system of automatic reminders sending to respondent gives possibility to rise response rate.

9. ISDMS architecture Integrated statistical data management system Corporative data Warehouse CSB Web Site User adminis- tration data base Dissemi-nation data base Metadata base Macrodata base FIREWALL Raw data base Registers base OLAP data base Microdata base Windows 2000 Server Advanced MS Internet Information Server SQL server 2000, PC-Axis ISDMS Business application Software Modules Data entry and validation module related with DB: Data aggregation module related with DB: Data analysis module related with DB: Core metadata base module related with DB: Registers module related with DB: METADATA USER ADMINISTRATION REGISTERS USER ADMINISTRATION METADATA MICRODATAREGISTERS USER ADMINISTRATION METADATA MICRODATA REGISTERS USER ADMINISTRATION OLAP METADATA MACRODATA Data dissemination module related with DB: Data WEB entry module related with DB: User administration module related with DB: Data mass entry module related with DB: Missed data imputation module related with DB: METADATA MICRODATA REGISTERS RAW DATABASE USER ADMINISTRATION METADATA MACRODATA REGISTERS USER ADMINISTRATION METADATA MICRODATA REGISTERS USER ADMINISTRATION METADATA MICRODATA REGISTERS DATA IMPUTATION SOFTWARE METADATA MICRODATA MACRODATA USER ADMINISTRATION

11. Guestionnaire design(MS Word) • Transfer to HTML • Linking to Metadata base • 4. Filling in the data on respondents site(ASP) • 5. Data transfer to CSB Raw data base • ( XML) • 6. Data checks and transfer to Microdata base(XML) System architecture

12. Technical platform and software: • Servers with Windows 2000 Advanced Server operating system • Microsoft products: • MS SQL Server2000 Enterprise Edition • MS Access2000 • MS Word 2000 • Active Server Pages WEB solution

13. Electronic data collection system is developed using ISDMS metadata base. • Electronic data collection system consists of the following modules: • HTML forms generation from Word documents and their publication to a WEB server, • Module, which provides with the data exchange between respondent and CSB (including the data entry and validation), • Respondents, questionnaires and data administration module.

14. http://www.csb.gov.lv/ LINKIG e SURVEY in live

15. Data entry and validation META DATA BASE BUSINESS REGISTER Description of validation rules Data import from files Creating list of Respon- dents Description of data entry forms Full data validation MICRO DATA BASE Standard data entry and validation Data validation RAW DATA BASE Data transfer to Microdata Base Mass data entry F i r e w a l l RAW Web DATA BASE Web data entry and validation Web Data validation

16. CONCLUSIONS • User interface is very user friendly and does not require special training neither on respondents’ side nor on CSB side, • Being developed as a part of Data Management System it can operate only with surveys described in the DMS common metadata base. In DMS there are 67 business statistics surveys at the time being, • Use of MS Internet Explorer is a restriction, a lot of enterprises are moving to open source software usage (Mozilla for instance),

17. CONCLUSIONS • Sometimes respondents are suffering from unstable work of the communication channels or Internet services providers, • Hot telephone help desk had to be established in CSB and system administrator takes over the technical assistance functions • It is not possible to fill in the same web form from several workstations or by several persons on respondent’ s side simultaneously.

18. Thank you for attention ! Karlis Zeila = Karlis.Zeila@csb.gov.lv http://www.csb.lv