Database publishing on the Internet

Abstract

Dissemination of official statistics via the Internet has entered a new stage. Creating individual HTML pages or PDF documents is expensive and requires manual quality control which is difficult to sustain on a continuing basis. The next development is to create HTML pages on the fly from information organized and maintained in databases of text and numbers.

This paper will review the current approaches of database publishing in general and the practical experiences in Statistics Canada so far with textual information bases and numeric databases interfaced to its web site. The importance of a data warehouse in this regard will be outlined.