Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Visualization, Data Sharing
and Metadata
Humphrey Southall
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
13.1 Introduction
In the early years of statistical computing, file formats associated with particular program
packages, and especially SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), provided a
lingua
franca
for researchers exchanging data. One consequence was that in its earliest years the
UK Data Archive, and similar organizations elsewhere, saw their job as archiving SPSS files.
Imagine if this simple situation had continued: you could take someone else's data and
load it straight into visualization software, and the software would automatically identify
variables, observations and associated labels and coding schemes; intelligent software would
make sensible decisions about how to present data to non-experts; crucially, Google and its
rivals would know how to scan the contents of such files, and searching for statistics on the
internet would be trivial, and not the current nightmare.
Sadly, our closest current approximation to an omnipresent interchange format is Excel,
but this defines almost no internal structure. This chapter reviews a new standard developed
by the Data Documentation Initiative working with archives worldwide, and describes how
it was used to directly control statistical visualization for inexperienced users in the web site
A Vision of Britain through Time
. Using it in this way proved to require significant extensions
to the standard, and the chapter as a whole argues that an effective standard linking data
gathering, statistical analysis and visualization will only emerge once data analysts become
more involved in standards setting.
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