|
IT and Databases
Labour
Market Policy Database
Alphametrics has played a key role in the development for DG Employment
and Eurostat (the Statistical Office of the EC) since 1998 of a database
for holding information on labour market policy measures.
The project has
been aimed at putting in place a tool for evaluating the effectiveness
of policies adopted by Member States to assist disadvantaged groups
in the labour market, such as young people with inadequate training
and qualifications, women who have interrupted their career for a
prolonged period to take care of children, people with disabilities
and ethnic minorities. Alphametrics has been responsible for all aspects
of the project, from devising the methodology for the system of classifying
policies and the design of the database to the collection, validation,
presentation and interpretation of data, including liasing with officials
in Departments of Employment and National Statistical Offices in all
EU Member States to provide help and advice in the collection of the
information required.
The database has been constructed to include data on both expenditure
and participants in programmes at a high level of detail, in order
to be able to follow individuals with different characteristics as
they are assisted by measures of various kinds and subsequently proceed
on to the labour market to try to find employment. It is underpinned
by a coherent classification system for categorising measures, formulated
by Alphametrics, and has been designed to enable information to be
readily retrieved and combined in various ways. It contains a great
deal of qualitative information to describe each of the measures included,
as well as quantitative details of expenditure and participants, a
combination which has meant that it has had to be custom-built (in
practice, the system is written in Visual Basic around an Access database).
The system has various facilities for analysis of data on-line and
also allows users to export different data sets to Excel or to other
specialist packages for analysis, while a multilingual interface (in
English, French, German, Spanish and Italian) enables users in different
EU countries to operate the software and input data even if they do
not understand English.
GT System
The revolution in information technology is resulting in an ever increasing
volume and variety of statistical data being made freely available.
To assist in the management of such data, Alphametrics has developed
a comprehensive socio-economic information system named GT.
GT facilitates the
storage, location and retrieval of multi-dimensional socio-economic
data from multiple sources with on-line documentation
The user-friendly
GT interface is designed to provide economists with logical access
to multi-dimensional data. Information retrieval in GT is driven by
a hierarchical keyword system. Wherever possible, GT uses standard
code tables to classify a subject. Once data is retrieved from the
database, this can be passed seamlessly to a standard spreadsheet
package allowing - with the use of special add-ins - the production
of graphs. GT can be easily configured to operate in most European
languages.
|
