An exciting project at WISERD is encouraging social science researchers to test and review new geoportal software.
The WISERD Geoportal (WGP) initiative aims to develop a web-based software application to enhance a researcher’s ability to discover socio-economic research data relating to Wales.
Run by the WISERD Data Integration Team, the WGP hopes to encourage collaborative research and the re-use of existing data.
Using free and open-source software (FOSS) components and services, a range of software tools have been developed by the team to capture standards compliant metadata for a variety of socio-economic data sources. The WGP provides map-based and text-based search tools for accessing this database.
The unique feature of the WGP is that it is dedicated to supporting quantitative and qualitative social science academic and policy research – something the team hadn’t previously encountered in their review of over 120 geoportals world-wide.
A particularly innovative aspect of the geoportal has involved the building of a rich meta-database of government surveys, geo-referenced semantically-tagged qualitative data (generated from primary research), grey data (from transcripts and journal publications for example), and routinely collected Government administrative data.
From September this year, the team will carry out end-user evaluations of the WGP via a network of testers. Following these evaluations, further developments will be made, with a release version of the WGP launched in December.
For more information please visit the WISERD Geoportal website, or contact Scott Orford, the WISERD Data Integration Coordinator at OrfordS@cardiff.ac.uk
Further information
A video demonstration of the Alpha version (early development stage) of the WGP is available to view, along with a presentation on the development of the WGP, an academic paper on the concept behind the WGP and the latest international conference paper. Please visit the WISERD Geoportal page to access these resources.