NIMR Mwanza through data management
unit is currently building capacity to establish data repository to help the
institution to be able to preserve data for a long time. We also believe that
its important in future to share our data, if we do not properly document our
data using the open standard tools which can be easily transferred and
understood across systems like DDI (XML based), it makes it hard for secondary
users to understand our data. So proper structured (XML) data documentation and
data dissemination facilities are required.
There
are a variety of tools for data documentation but NIMR Mwanza agreed to use the
following tools:-
·
Nesstar publisher – Is a DDI 2 authoring
tool, it is free and easy to understand; this will help us to document our
data.
·
Pentaho kettle – Is a free data
integration tool delivers powerful Extraction, Transformation and Loading
(ETL); this will help us to extract, transform data from different sources and
load data to the repository
·
NADA repository - is a web-base repository system; this will help us to share
data with secondary users
Progress so far
So
far, we have documented about 15 rounds of the Demographic Surveillance System
(DSS) data. We plan to get Verbal Autopsy (VA) and serological survey data
documented by end of year.
