Contents:

Aims and Benefits

Description: Datashops, VIROS, WWW, CIRCA

Future Plans

Contacts

Aim and Benefits

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The aim is to establish a dissemination environment for end users of statistics where the products are attractive, understandable, timely and readily available. The benefits to users of the dissemination environment are:

access to a greater resource of information from which to draw their own conclusions;

enhanced co-operative approach on dissemination activities;

illustrated statistical data, using photographs, charts, sound and video, making them more accessible by the educated but not statistically trained reader;

rapid access to key documents, information sheets, standards and auto-installable software through the DSIS Information Resource Centre, available to statistical working groups, statistical task forces and others involved in Statistics, Telematic Networks & EDI (STNE).

Description

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The dissemination environment is the part of the DSIS framework that will be most obvious and of most use to the 'end users' of statistics, decision makers for whom the statistics were originally produced and the public at large.
 

Data Shops: A Data Shop is like a high street shop where individual organisations, companies or members of the general public can request in person, telephone, fax, normal mail or electronic mail, general information on harmonised and comparable EU statistics. There are Data Shops in Luxembourg, Brussels, Paris, Rome, Zurich, Stockholm and London. The Lisbon datashop has just opened in September 1998. The Helsinki datashop is expected to be open by the end of 1998.  Prices are harmonised, so that whatever datashop a customer uses, the price for data is the same. Prices are set in EURO in Luxembourg and then the individual data shop makes adjustments for local taxes. The time taken to process the data is variable. Simple requests can be procesed in a few minutes but complicated aggregation of statistics not forseen in advance, take longer.

The VIROS ( Virtual Institute for Research in Official Statistics) concept, which has been designed and developed by Eurostat, aims to help in the search for and access to information on research in official statistics. It can be likened to a mall or shopping centre metaphor. Any organisation active in the field of official statistics can participate in the system. Each participating organisation is responsible for its own contribution. Eurostat simply acts as a central co-ordinator. Documents are searched for using search engines such as AltaVista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos and Northern Light. Authors use keywords in their documents and publications to ensure that the search engine will locate it. There is also a link to a machine translation service called SYSTRAN, which offers approximate translation of documents from English to 5 different languages.

MULTIMEDIA and WWW: DSIS organisation within Member States are members of the "Europa Club" (on the Internet "Europa" server of the European Commission) so that access to the Eurostat reference environment is available to National Statistical Institutes (NSIs). Some relevant World Wide Web sites are:
 

IDA: Interchange of Data between Administrations - a DGIII programme: http://www.ispo.cec.be/ida/

Eurostat : Statistical Office of the European Communities:  http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/eurostat/eurostat.html

NSIs: National Statistical Institute.The organisation responsible for statistics within a Member State: http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/eurostat/serven/part8/8a1.htm Note: most NSI sites have a list of links to other NSIs, OECD etc.

Communication and Information Resource Centre Administrator (CIRCA): CIRCA (formally known as the DSIS-IRC) is a Web-based service which has been developed to support Eurostat Working Groups. However it has caught the imagination of other commission services and is now being implemented elsewhere. Working Groups and other entities are referred to as Interest Groups. A limited amount of information is available to everyone but more detailed information about each Interest Group is only available to registered users. Interest Groups have the choice; whether they are visible to the public and if so, which part of their information is visible. The main services available to registered users including members of the STNE Interest Group are:

information on the interest group;  a document library for reference information;  discussion newsgroups;  a search engine;  members’ directory, contacts list and meeting dates;  access control ( for accounting and security).

The CIRCA has been integrated into the World Wide Web architecture of the European Commission. Version 2.0 has just been released providing a more stable service and many new features.
 
 
 

Future Plans

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Version 2.1 of the CIRCA is currently being tested and is due to be released in March 1999. New features will include document versioning, performance enhancements and virtual meetings, multilinguism (German, English and French) and interfaces to external applications. New ideas regarding future development of the site are to be decided by a steering committee based on user feedback collected from the CIRCA User Interest Group. Participants are invited to send comments about the site to this group.

VIROS has now been installed on the World Wide Web under provisional guidelines, so that it can be validated. There is room for improvement and a number of directions will be followed e.g. the number of search engines may be increased or users may be given the option of limiting their sources of information to a set of recognised organisations. Further information can be obtained from the VIROS Home Page on the WWW at: http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/eurostat/research/viros/

It is planned that Datashopswill be set up in the whole of the EU. However it is still undecided as to when datashops in Austria and Greece will open. Countries outside of the EU that wish to join the network are also welcome. Future aims include plans to consolidate the network and to further define the standards of the service. Users of the datashops will have access to the Commission's databases such as New Cronos and Comext. There are also plans to analyse the type of data requested so that frequently requested data can be retrieved more efficiently and quickly.
 

Contacts

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VIROS	http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/eurostat/research/viros/
CIRCA	http://forum.europa.eu.int/dsis/  requests for registration: secretariat.STNE@eurostat.cec.be  Information regarding version 2.1 of software:  bengt-ake.lindblad@ec.europa.eu
DATASHOPS	http:www2.echo.lu/info2000/midas/datashop.html