Facilitating the Interoperable Use of Cross-Domain Statistical Data Based on Standardized Identifiers (Short Paper)

In the big data era, the successful sharing and integration of data from various resources becomes an essential requirement. As statistical data serves as the foundation for professional domains to report the phenomena in the reality according to the selected administration units, its importance has been well recognized. However, statistical data is typically collected and published by different responsible agencies, hence the heterogeneity of how the data is designed, prepared and disseminated becomes an obstacle impeding the automatic and interoperable use in multidisciplinary applications. From a standardization perspective, this research proposes an identifier-based framework for modeling the spatial, temporal and thematic aspects of cross-domain statistical data, such that any piece of distributed statistical information can be correctly and automatically interpreted without any ambiguity for further analysis and exploration. The results indicate the proposed mechanism successfully enables a comprehensive management of indicators from different resources and enhances the easier data retrieval and correct use across different domains. Meanwhile, the interface design exemplifies an innovated improvement on the presentation and interpretation of statistical information. The proposed solution can be readily implemented for building a transparent sharing environment for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).