The key objective of the WISERD Geoportal (WGP) initiative is to develop a web-based software application to enhance a researcher’s ability to discover socio-economic research data relating to Wales, with the aim of encouraging collaborative research and re-use of existing data.
Using free and open-source software (FOSS) components and services, a range of software tools have been developed by the WISERD Data Integration Team to capture standards compliant metadata for a variety of socio-economic data sources, and the WGP provides map-based and text-based search tools for accessing this database.
The WGP is unique in that, in our review of over 120 geoportals world-wide, we have not previously encountered a geoportal dedicated to supporting quantitative and qualitative social science academic and policy research. A particularly innovative aspect of the geoportal has involved the building of a rich meta-database of government surveys, geo-referenced semantically-tagged qualitative data (generated from primary research), grey data (e.g. from transcripts, journal publications, books, Ph.D. theses) and routinely collected Government administrative data (e.g. school-level education data).