Joint colloquium on spatial and statistical data

Last friday, the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) and the Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo) held a joint colloquium on spatial and statistical data. The event was held at swisstopo in Wabern, but was also streamed and recorded.

The video of the colloquium is available online. Unfortunately, at least at the time of writing, swisstopo has made the recording available exclusively on YouTube and does not allow embedding.

In good Swiss tradition, the speakers alternate between French and German (reasonably subtitled, so translation to English works fine). The video includes:

• Introduction by Romain Douard, defining both spatial and statistical data and their idiosyncrasies

• Data about buildings and addresses (from 6:44, by Grégoire Bögli (swisstopo) and Fabian Trees (FSO)), specifically the GWR/RegBL (building and address register)

• Affordances and challenges in using spatial data for statistical purposes (from 30:18, by Emanuel Schmassmann (swisstopo) and Thomas Noirjean (FSO)), looking at an example of using the topographic landscape model (TLM)¹ for statistical analyses

• Metadata ²  management (from 48:53, by Raphaëlle Arnaud (swisstopo) and Michael Koscevic (FSO)), about the legal basis for metadata management, the future platform metadata.swiss, and collaboration between the two offices in this area

• Q&A session (from 1:08:08)

I found the part about the data in the buildings and addresses register and the processes behind it, e.g. back-filling the GWR/RegBL particularly interesting. Unfortunately, there was only relatively little discussion in the Q&A session. Hopefully, we’ll see more successful collaboration in the data space in the future.

Footnotes

1. Swisstopo’s topographic landscape model, the basis of swissTLM3D, a large-scale 3D vector dataset describing Switzerland’s landscape.

2. “Geometadata” is used in some legal bases and standards to denote “metadata on geospatial data”. I don’t like this term. Granted, geospatial data does have some special metadata properties (maybe specifically those should be called “geometadata”, if anything, not all metadata on geodata). But so do biomedical data, meteorological data, and digital humanities data, without coming up with specific terminology as far as I’m aware.