Improvement of Data Access on the Way to Remote Data Access in Germany
Tim Hochguertel
Research Data Centre, Federal Statistical Office, Wiesbaden, Germany

Since a couple of years access to micro data in Germany is possible through different ways. The researcher can use so-called Scientific Use Files in his own institution. Even for business micro data, the researcher can visit the safe centre or can use remote data execution. User needs are developing towards on-site data access, because researchers would like to work with original data mostly.

This leads to a higher burden for the employees of the Research Data Centre (RDC) as for remote data execution they have to apply the analysis programs and have to deal with the manual output checking of the results. Also the researchers themselves have to wait longer to get their results. The project “An informational infrastructure for the E-Science Age” (infinite) deals with the improvement of Remote Access in Germany. The project aims to find solutions for better Remote Access in Germany through so-called data structure files and (automatic) output checking procedures.

To reduce the expenditure of time, the Research Data Centre develops in the project infinite in cooperation with partners data structure files, which should allow the user a syntactic and semantic test of the own code. Based on this semantic and syntactic structure file, in the future it should be possible for the user to obtain hints for the final results. This syntactic and semantic structure file should reduce the frequencies of sending codes from the users to the Research Data Centre. In the project “An informational infrastructure for the E-Science Age” the Research Data Centre develops in cooperation with partners this syntactic and semantic data structure file.

A second goal of infinite is the development of fundamentals for a Remote Data Access in Germany. A full automated Remote Access is a vision for the future. In countries with comparable legal situation as Germany, a full automated Remote Access could not be realize until now. For a full automated Remote Access different technical, legal and methodical solutions are necessary.

At the moment there are no tools for an automatic output checking available, which guarantees absolutely anonymity for the results of a user. One possible solution for this problem is to generate results automatically which are de-facto anonym. Users can obtain these de-facto anonymous results as intermediate results. Only the results, which the user likes to publish, have to check for absolutely anonymisation.

Keywords: Remote Access; Official Statistics; Micro Data; Business Statistics

Biography: Tim Hochguertel is member of staff in the Rearch Data Centre of the Federal Statistical Office Germany. He is also the project leader of the project “An informational infrastructure for the E-Science Age” (infinite).