Data middle platform construction: The strategy and practice of National Bureau of Statistics of China

Abstract

To address the data ‘islandization’ issue in the statistical field and to take advantage of the opportunity of the Statistical Cloud construction, the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) started adopting the concept of a “data middle platform” for data resource planning. With it, NBS aims to build a comprehensive data capability platform that includes data collection and exchange; data sharing and integration; data organizing and processing; data modeling and analyses; data management and governance; and data service and application. The statistical data middle platform provides the basic capability for data application support. It also enables data to form a closed loop between the data middle platform and the business system, and eventually realizes the ‘servitization’ of statistical data that meets internal and societal requirements. As a new innovative development, the statistical data middle platform will not only solve the long-standing data island problem of NBS but will also provide a basic guarantee for greater use of the data potential, and thus will help official statistics to transform from statistical analysis to predictive analysis, from single-domain to cross-domain, from passive analysis to active analysis, and from non-real-time to real-time analysis. The paper was prepared under the kind mentorship of Ronald Jansen, Assistant Director and Chief of Data Innovation at the UN Statistics Division in New York.