Building a statistics lighthouse for all decision makers

The purpose of official statistics is to provide a common basis for people’s understanding of society, and thus help them making informed decisions. This makes it necessary to provide users with information of the available statistics; first regarding all statistics from each data provider (e.g. Statistics Denmark), and second between several data providers, in a country via a national portal and eventually across the world via portals at regional and global level. 

In order to get this goal, metadata standards are a must. The use of the standards must be so intuitive that users, advanced as well as simple, can benefit. This requires introduction to terminology and information to users, aiming at making it easy to navigate in the information about statistics provided in the portals. In addition the standards must be understood and implementable by producers of statistics in the production processes. Dissemination processes are especially important, since these processes ensure that external users are supported as best possible. Metadata standards used as part of  an intuitive common terminology must be integrated into the dissemination systems so that the “distance” between the statistics and metadata will be as short as possible and increase users’ understanding of official statistics. DDI together with other standards should be a key to solving all of these tasks.