Statistical & Survey processing and analysis

Designed by statisticians for statisticians / Choice of interfaces / Speed is everything / Unique features / Statistical process / SuperSTAR users / 'Duty of care' / Market research / Web dissemination / Mapping / Data quality / Privacy protection

Designed by statisticians for statisticians
The SuperSTAR suite has been designed to meet the special needs of national statistical agencies and market research organizations. It combines extreme tabulation performance with ease of use (no programming) and 'just right' functionality to offer a complete out of the box solution for survey processing and dissemination.

 

SuperSTAR is used by many of the world's leading statistical and market research organizations to process and disseminate data from surveys, censuses and registers.

 

The suite embodies Space-Time Research's mission - to make data access and analysis easy and error free. We have been working with the world's leading statistical and market research agencies to developsolutions that meet the unique needs of these organizations.

Choice of interfaces
The interfaces, desktop and web, have been designed to construct multi-dimensional tables dynamically without the need for programming or training. Users simply have a list of fields from the survey that can be dragged into table dimensions.

For more information, see SuperCROSS For more information, see SuperWEB

Speed is everything
Behind the interfaces is the high performance tabulation engine, SuperSERVER. SuperSERVER can process in excess of 2 million records per second on a Windows server and is what makes live access to large surveys possible such as population censuses. SuperSERVER caters for complex surveys with many related tables and also large classifications such as geography or trade commodities.

Unique features
The SuperSTAR suite provides for the unique requirements of statistical agencies including:

<Large and complex micro (unit record) databases
<Large statistical classifications such as industry, occupation, HS (commodity) and geography
<Privacy protection (confidentiality, cell suppression, consequential suppression)
<Cross tabulations
<Statistical calculations
<Multi lingual capability - software and data
 <Metadata access
<Display of geographic data via maps
<Direct unit record access for quality purposes
<Creation of synthetic (derived) fields
<'Duty of care' functions to minimize errors
<Fully graphical interfaces - no programming
<Web or desktop interfaces
<Dissemination of aggregated results to the public

Statistical process
The SuperSTAR suite is designed to be embedded in the statistical environment. Data is sourced from the corporate repository, tabulations are run in SuperSTAR and the outputs loaded to output systems or made ready for dissemination with SuperWEB.

The diagram below shows the key SuperSTAR components embedded in a statistical environment.

 

SuperSTAR connects directly to other systems such as metadata repositories, confidentiality systems, mapping and LDAP security.  

SuperSTAR is a client/ server solution with two interface options:

<SuperCROSS, the desktop application for internal use providing a rich tabulation environment for statisticians.
<SuperWEB, the web browser tool providing internal and external access to both micro and aggregated data.
The tabulation engine, SuperSERVER, provides system security, direct access to metadata repositories, confidentiality, and mapping.

SuperCHANNEL is used to load data into the system via ODBC, JDBC and text drivers.

SuperSTAR users
The system is being used by many of the world's most demanding statistical agencies including:

<ONS - UK
<Statistics Finland
<GUS - Poland
<Statistics Sweden
<Statistics Norway
<OFS - Switzerland
<Statistics Austria
 <LDS-NRW - Germany
<Statistics South Africa
<ABS - Australia
<Statistics New Zealand
<US Census Bureau
<Statistics Denmark
The system is used on a wide range of Censuses, sample surveys and registers including:
<Population Census
<Agricultural Census
<Enterprise/ Business register
<Overseas Trade
<Migration
 <Household labour force survey
<Building construction
<Manufacturing survey
<Population estimates
<Tourism

'Duty of care'
Space-Time Research coined the phrase 'duty of care' to describe a series of inbuilt functions in the software to minimize the likelihood of error.

An example of a duty of care function is related to what is being counted in a table. Our research has shown that when the data contains many fact tables e.g. dwellings and persons from a population census, a common error is forgetting to select the appropriate table to count. The SuperSTAR software automatically counts the table from the fields used in the query or asks the user what to select if fields are used from multiple tables.

Market research
While market research surveys may not be very big in terms of numbers of records they are usually complex and have a large number of questions. SuperSTAR is ideally suited to analyse these surveys either internally by the market research organization or by the organization the survey was conducted for using SuperWEB.

A SuperSTAR driver provides a connection to common survey collections systems such as Surveycraft, Quantum, Confirmit, Blaise and Survey Manager by ASR. The SuperSTAR interfaces cater for complicated multi response questions therefore removing the need for users to worry about multi-response questions and answers.

Web dissemination
The SuperSTAR component, SuperWEB, is designed for web dissemination of data offering end users maximum flexibility and ease of use. Aggregated or micro data can be used with SuperWEB and tables can be visualised as charts, maps or relationship tables.

SuperWEB can be deployed out of the box or customized and embedded with existing web sites.

Mapping
The SuperSTAR system provides both desktop and web mapping. Geographic data can be displayed as thematic maps and area selection can be performed from the map.

Data quality
Often, it is not until you start running tabulations that data errors appear. This is known as macro editing. SuperSTAR is efficient at macro editing as it can quickly identify erroneous cells using a technique called ColourVIEW and then allow you to drill down into the underlying records using RecordVIEW.

Privacy protection
The SuperSTAR system can apply confidentiality routines to tables to preserve confidentiality. There are a series of inbuilt functions such as random rounding, cell suppression based on the number of contributing records as well as connection to confidentiality systems such as Tau Argus.

Please contact us to discuss your requirements.

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