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Abu Dhabi Statistics Conference, held in Abu Dhabi, 12-13 May 2013, concluded successfully with key recommendations from international statisticians and decision makers.
Organised by Statistics Centre – Abu Dhabi (SCAD) under the patronage of H.H. Sheikh Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the conference brought together 18 international speakers and over 550 statisticians, experts and policy makers from around the world. The conference, themed under “Contributing in Development- Improving Quality of Administrative Data”, aimed to fulfill the main objective: increasing awareness of the importance of administrative data records produced by governments, semi-government, and private corporations.
It provided a platform for coordination of international statistical work aimed at achieving common goals such as reducing burden, increasing quality and supply of statistics for decision making and reducing costs.
The two-day event featuring presentations and panel-discussions amongst 18 global statisticians and experts, culminated in a meeting to discuss recommendations to improve the quality of administrative data for contributing to development of economies. The challenges outlined during the meeting and the recommendations are as follows:
1. To overcome the challenge of multiple sources of data, develop a framework to assess the quality and make decisions on the correct and relevant source to be used for varying circumstances.
2. To integrate data with missing keys, develop a data linking methodology and using unique identifiers to increase the quality of linked data.
3. Develop systems to support an “Assemble-to-Order business model” as compared to “Made-to-order business model”.
4. In order to create value by transforming raw data into statistics, knowledge and insight, by SCAD and by the users themselves, develop, adapt, buy and make available self-helping capability for users to create value from SCAD data holdings. This includes access to micro-data and data visualisation capabilities. A related recommendation is to develop the capability to maintain confidentiality at the same time.
5. To harness opportunities from Big Data, keep a watching brief and contribute to the statisticians’ quest for values from Big Data.
6. Capability development to equip the staff with the necessary skills and mind-set to do the work.
7. Extend the agreements of data exchange using standards to make it simpler and to allow automation. The international statistical community has utilised statistical data and metadata exchange (SDMX) for this purpose to make data-exchange easy.
Plenary sessions on the second day of the conference also discussed the issues and solutions for managing quality through data life cycle and maintaining of data quality in dissemination.
Claude Julien, Director – Business Survey Methods at Statistics Canada shed light on corporate mechanisms used to improve and maintain quality of administrative data. She also described how the use of administrative data has evolved in Canadian census, business and household survey infrastructures from playing a supporting role to becoming the primary source of data rather than those collected directly from respondents.
As part of the same panel, Eric Nordholt, Senior researcher and project leader, Census of Statistics Netherlands, discussed the quality of registers used for Dutch official statistics.
Highlighting the need for developing an Information Architecture to make increasingly complex information delivery systems-discoverable and understandable, Merry Branson, Head – Customer Service Branch at Australian Bureau of Statistics, also outlined the importance of using metadata and a responsive design to help our content stand out from the crowd in the search results.
During the conference, (SCAD) also announced the launch of three strategic initiatives, namely the ‘Personal Inflation Calculator’, ‘Purchasing Power Calculator’, and ‘Abu Dhabi Population Clock’. These initiatives are the first of their kind in the Middle East and are being offered online to provide maximum benefit to users.
The Personal Inflation Calculator initiative will allow users to calculate their personal inflation levels, both in terms of individual expenditures and family expenditures. The method used by the new initiative to calculate family or personal expenditure is more accurate than other techniques which depend on consumer price index (CPI) to calculate the average change in standard products basket, and as a result measures only average inflation levels.
Purchasing Power Calculator links the purchasing power of the UAE dirham with average inflation levels based on CPI. This digital application is capable of calculating the purchasing power of the dirham in Abu Dhabi during any year from 1980 onwards.
Abu Dhabi Population Clock is based on an online program that estimates changes in population levels by the second as per the personal computer’s clock. The change in population numbers is calculated by adding the number of new entries at immigration centres with the new births in the country and deducting the number of deaths reported.
On the sidelines of the conference, SCAD signed six Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) on strategic partnerships with government and private sector entities in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. The MoUs were signed with Abu Dhabi Municipality, Department of Transport Abu Dhabi, Urban Planning Council (UPC), Abu Dhabi Sports Council, private mapping and surveying company - Bayanat and global business analytics company SAS. The collaborations are part of SCAD’s efforts to increase the level of cooperation on data sharing and engaging key entities to develop accurate data to support development initiatives in Abu Dhabi.
The conference was organized as part of SCAD’s initiative to mark the “Year of Statistics”, an international awareness campaign involving 1,850 statistics authorities from 122 countries.
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