Helmes is privileged to be a part of an international team of the OECD contributing to the software development of a grand-scale statistics platform.
The OECD provides a medium in which governments can work together to share experiences and seek solutions to common problems.
To do so, the organisation has established a community that is called the Statistical Information System Collaboration Community. It’s a group of statistical organisations sharing similar strategic objectives, pooling resources and ideas to co-innovate and co-produce state-of-the-art digital solutions to support official statistics.
This community helps statistical organisations to manage in a much more cost-efficient way and to avoid reinventing the wheel.
The aim of the Statistical Information System Collaboration Community is to support the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals reporting by implementing common open-source tools based on the .Stat Suite architecture. The utilisation of the system is much broader, including, for example, The National Bank of Belgium, The National Institute of Statistics of Italy, The International Labour Organisation, and UNICEF.
Most of the community members have been using the previous version of .Stat Suite for years to disseminate their statistical data, but it was time to move on and using the platforms built on newer technologies (JavaScript, .NET, SDMX, Solr).
See also: Custom software development
The software development team behind this platform hails from France, Estonia, Hungary, and community members across the globe.
The .Stat Suite system is in constant development and it strives for excellence. The platform covers the complete data life cycle: designing, collecting, processing, analysing and dissemination.
.Stat Suite is capable of storing any type of modelled statistical data using SDMX, the special standard for the statistical data and metadata exchange.
The advantages of this continuously improved global platform are:
The enormous functionality of .Stat relies on three pillars:
The .Stat Suite is based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that applies the main principles of the Common Statistical Production Architecture (CSPA). That means a loose coupling to avoid strong dependencies and apply a modular architecture. All web services are built on the .NET Core framework and can be accessed over SSL.
The SDMX REST web service and the SDMX Reference Infrastructure framework, developed by Eurostat, is integrated to the .Stat Suite platform and is one of the central features for the data life-cycle support.
The .Stat UI is built on the open source library of Reusable Components for the Web (RCW) that can be used independently or combined with the data portals. The technical stack on which the UI components are based is React for the UI, Redux for the behaviour, and D3 for the chart engine.
Solr is an open-source search engine that is used to store the indexed information about the .Stat Suite datasets and to return the relevant search results to the users.
The .Stat platform runs on the free version of Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Express. However, better performance can be achieved when using the licensed versions of Microsoft SQL Server.
.Stat Suite accommodates the whole life cycle of statistical data, which is already a strong benefit. But there’s more. The list of exceptional benefits include: