ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR EUROPE English only CONFERENCE OF EUROPEAN STATISTICIANS UN/ECE Work Session on Statistical Metadata (Washington, D.C., United States, 28-30 November 2000) Topic (i): Statistical metadata for dissemination STATISTICS CANADA’S INTEGRATED METADATABASE CURRENT STATUS AND FUTURE PLANS

2. The second phase of the Integrated metadatabase project is now completed. Statistics Canada has designed a database in which information on all 400 of its active statistical programs is stored, as well as information on another 400 discontinued programs. The database was implemented in Oracle 8 and is resident on a central server. Metadata was collected from a variety of pre-existing metadata stores, reformatted and validated and loaded into the new metadatabase. On a regular basis, an HTML generator reads the database and produces formatted HTML pages, which are made available on the Statistics Canada website. They can be accessed through hyperlinks from our output online database, known as CANSIM 2, or from our online catalogue or from statistical tables on the website. The pages can also be accessed directly through a search engine in the metadata section of the website. The database is kept up to date through an input system, implemented in Java, and deployed over the Intranet to the desktops of the authors in the data producing programs. Updates are quality assured and registered before being made available for generation of the external HTML pages.