Co-Operative Processing — A Challenge for Statistics and Database Management

According to the essential importance of data for all kinds of statistics the data organisation was and is and will be a very crucial point in statistical work in general and especially in Official Statistical Information Systems (OSIS). This background is reflected in scientific papers and discussions on conferences and workshops over a long time, which however also show a change in emphasis and context in respect to data organisation. Since the end of the sixties the formation of statistical databases has dominated the development of OSIS. With the now arising new conditions, namely the changes in the environment of each OSIS and the evolving of supranational OSIS, both statistics and database management are forced to react. The indispensable new organisation of the division of labour in the whole process of producing and consuming official statistics will require perfecting the up to now dominating distributed processing by a new quality: co-operative processing. But this new quality is not possible without some further development of the management of statistical databases.