Morpheus – An innovative approach to remote data access

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Höninger, Julia

Affiliations: State Statistical Institute Berlin-Brandenburg, Alt-Friedrichsfelde 60, 10315 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Morpheus is a novel approach in providing remote access to micro data of official statistics. Researchers work on anonymous micro data files with common statistical software packages and get their results back in real time. Additionally, a measure of goodness of fit will be provided for every single result. Therefore researchers can work with the anonymous results as they can have confidence that they would have obtained the same or very similar results with the original data. All statistical analyses and all commands are allowed. Furthermore, users can browse through the anonymous data which is very helpful when developing program syntax and not possible in most other systems of remote access. Research data centres would greatly benefit from such a system as well, as the cumbersome manual disclosure control would be eliminated. All results would be safe and automatically returned to the researcher. This system would respect the special requirements to micro data access even in Germany where laws are especially strict.

Keywords: Future data access, research data centre, confidential micro data

DOI: 10.3233/SJI-2012-0753

Journal: Statistical Journal of the IAOS, vol. 28, no. 3-4, pp. 151-157, 2012