Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods
Sefydliad Ymchwill Gymdeithasol ac Economaidd, Data a Dulliau Cymru
www.wiserd.ac.uk

The WISERD Geoportal

What is the WISERD Geoportal?

The key objective of the WISERD Geoportal (WGP) initiative is to develop a web-based software application to enhance a researcher’s ability to discover socio-economic research data relating to Wales, with the aim of encouraging collaborative research and 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 WISERD Data Integration Team to capture standards compliant metadata for a variety of socio-economic data sources, and the WGP provides map-based and text-based search tools for accessing this database.

The WGP is unique in that, in our review of over 120 geoportals world-wide, we have not previously encountered a geoportal dedicated to supporting quantitative and qualitative social science academic and policy research. 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 (e.g. from transcripts, journal publications, books, Ph.D. theses) and routinely collected Government administrative data (e.g. school-level education data).

NEW!

The WISERD Geoportal now has its very own website which includes a demonstration video and a registration page for those interested in helping to test the Geoportal.

Schedule

  • Beta testing of the WGP – September 2011
  • User feedback and further development – October-December 2011
  • WGP release version launch – end of Dec 2011

More about the WISERD Geoportal

  • Video demonstration of the Alpha version (early development stage) available here.
  • Presentation on the development of the WGP available here.
  • Academic paper on the concept behind the WGP available here.
  • Latest international conference paper available here.

Get involved: Call for Testers!

The WISERD Data Integration Team will be conducting an end-user evaluation of the WGP in September-October 2011. We would like to recruit as many testers as possible, from both participating WISERD institutions and from external organisations with an interest in the WGP. If you would like to register as a tester, please complete the registation form on the WGP website, or email the WISERD Data Integration Team at the University of Glamorgan (wiserd@glam.ac.uk).