SOCIAL DATA MANAGEMENT ENVIRONMENT

The Social Data Management Environment (SDME) is a complete group of software tools that allows the social data management and process by the users of the Social Data Bank. The Social Data Management Environment was designed originally and developed within the framework of EPET II and more specifically within the "Development of Integrated Social Data Management Environment". The environment was later completed with information search tools developed together with the Special information Bank (SIB).

- Data input tools
The environment provides the researcher with the tools needed for the computer input and the microdata documentation of the empirical research and results.

- Processing tools
The environment contains tools for processing and presenting the social data.

- Data search tools
Data search is done in the following fashion:

a) by the SIB's business data which allow us to trace research, or data groups corresponding to defined search criteria such as time period, country or region, thematic division etc.

b) Through the Social Data Bank dictionaries which allow us to trace data groups on the basis of certain variable characteristics concerning our analysis.

The Term dictionary
The search procedure through the dictionary is the following :

• We select one of the listed key words.
  
• The system informs us of all the definitions referring to this specific word (term, in Greek, term in English, definition n Greek).
  
• We then select the term that concerns us.
  
• The system inform us of all variables referring to the specific term.
  
• We then select the variables that concern us.
  
• The system informs us of the corresponding data groups.

The data dictionary

The data dictionary includes a description of all the data elements (variables) defined within specific research such as those described in the encoding book of the corresponding research. The description contains the manner of measurement of the specific variable, the corresponding value field etc.