Abstract
It is very likely that electronic means of data reporting will become a standard in the near future. In the case of organizations with a wide range of surveys to manage, however, the effort involved in developing, disseminating and maintaining electronic questionnaires tailored to specific surveys is prohibitive. What is needed is a complete infrastructure covering all phases of the data collection process from the preparation of electronic questionnaires by subject matter specialists up to the management and initial processing of the transmitted raw data.
In 1998 Statistics Austria initiated a research project with the mandate to develop a generic solution of this kind for electronic raw data collection that can be used for any survey by specifying all survey-related meta-information – including questionnaire forms and validation checks – in Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) format. The core component of this system, the “electronic questionnaire management system” e-Quest, is a product that especially suits the requirements of complex statistical surveys.
The paper presents the architecture of the system (including system components that are used internally at Statistics Austria for the preparation of new electronic questionnaires and for the processing of incoming data) and describes basic design principles and how they were implemented in e-Quest. Also discussed are different types and layers of metadata in the context of electronic data reporting.
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