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SAVE THE DATE
November 2, 2005
NICS and Metadata:
Joys, Sorrows, and Payoffs
NICS Community of Practice
Hosted by the Urban Markets
Initiative,
The Brookings Institution
Statistical
metadata provide information about a data set. Metadata examples include
record layout, data definitions, and standard errors. Analysts need this type
of documentation in order to find, understand, and manipulate statistical
data. They also need it to be able to integrate or compare data from multiple
data sets.
Accurate,
appropriate, consistently provided metadata, then, are indispensable to the
success of NICS. But preparing metadata, particularly for administrative
records, can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Moreover, data
analysts often are not well versed in how to use metadata from secondary data
sets to facilitate data use and integration.
The
purpose of this meeting of the CoP is to determine how we can best manage the
metadata dimension of NICS. After a brief tutorial on the basics of metadata,
we will address the following questions: What metadata are essential for
NICS-ready data sets? What resources are available to help data providers
prepare these metadata as painlessly as possible? What resources are
available to help data users use metadata to integrate or compare data from
multiple data sets? How can NICS best encourage the preparation and effective
use of metadata?
We
hope you will be able to join us in a discussion of these important
questions. This meeting offers a significant opportunity to guide the
development of NICS.
An invitation
packet will be mailed to you in early October.
For
further information, please contact Laura Smith at lsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
November 2, 2005 .
8:45 – 3:30
The Brookings
Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW . Washington,
DC
We hope to see you there!
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