Towards a semantic data library for the social sciences

Abstract

Quantitative research in the Social Sciences heavily relies on survey and statistical data. While researchers often put a lot of effort in generating such data, the incorporation and reuse of existing data on the web is far behind its potential. The lack of reuse can be attributed to various deficits in terms of library services, in particular, common exchange formats, annotations with metadata or standard approaches for integrating and merging data sets as well as the lack of an easy approach for searching data records and a lack of publicly available data sets. To overcome such problems which in the past have already been addressed by libraries, we propose a framework for seeking, merging, integrating and aggregating distributed statistical and survey data based on open semantic formats. We present a first prototype implementation as show case for the framework and highlight the benefits for social scientists. (author's abstract)