Colectica is a suite of programs for use in managing official statistics

Official statistics

Official statistics are statistics published by government agencies or other public bodies such as international organizations. They provide quantitative or qualitative information on all major areas of citizens' lives, such as economic and social development, living conditions, health, education,...

 and statistical survey

Statistical survey

Survey methodology is the field that studies surveys, that is, the sample of individuals from a population with a view towards making statistical inferences about the population using the sample. Polls about public opinion, such as political beliefs, are reported in the news media in democracies....

s using open standard

Open standard

An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed . There is no single definition and interpretations vary with usage....

s that enable researchers, archivists, and programmers to perform:

• questionnaire
  Questionnaire
  A questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a series of questions and other prompts for the purpose of gathering information from respondents. Although they are often designed for statistical analysis of the responses, this is not always the case...
  
   design
• automatic programming
  Automatic programming
  In computer science, the term automatic programming identifies a type of computer programming in which some mechanism generates a computer program to allow human programmers to write the code at a higher abstraction level....
  
   for computer-assisted telephone interviewing systems
• data entry, retrieval
  Information retrieval
  Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...
  
  , and management
  Data management
  Data management comprises all the disciplines related to managing data as a valuable resource.- Overview :The official definition provided by DAMA International, the professional organization for those in the data management profession, is: "Data Resource Management is the development and execution...
  
  
• statistical analysis
  Statistics
  Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
  
  
• microdata
  Microdata
  Microdata Corporation was an Irvine, California based computer company, developing hardware and operating systems to run its REALITY environment...
  
   documentation and management
• applications
  Application software
  Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
  
   development
• data warehousing
• metadata standards
  Metadata standards
  Metadata standards are requirements which are intended to establish a common understanding of the meaning or semantics of the data, to ensure correct and proper use and interpretation of the data by its owners and users...
  
   creation such as Data Documentation Initiative
  Data Documentation Initiative
  The Data Documentation Initiative is an international project to create a standard for information describing statistical and social science data. Begun in 1995, the effort brings together data professionals from around the world to develop the standard. The DDI specification, written in XML,...
  
  

Colectica is currently in use by a variety of University survey centers, National Statistics Offices, and Data archives
.

History

Colectica was originally funded in part by the NIH

National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...

 National Institute on Aging

National Institute on Aging

The National Institute on Aging ' is a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health , located in Baltimore, Maryland.The NIA leads a broad scientific effort to understand the nature of aging and to extend the healthy, active years of life...

 to explore automatic documentation of computer assisted surveys. This grant saw the creation of metadata extraction and flowchart creation tools for CASES, Blaise

Blaise (software)

Blaise is a computer-assisted interviewing system and survey processing tool for the Windows operating system. The system is being developed by Statistics Netherlands and has been designed for use in official statistics...

, and CSPro

CSPro

CSPro, short for Census and Survey Processing System is a public domain statistical package developed by the U.S. Census Bureau, Macro International , and Serpro S.A. Its major funding was from the U.S. Agency for International Development.The software can be used for entering, editing, tabulating,...

survey instrument source code. The functionality of these tools, originally named SurveyViz, is now bundled with the Colectica Designer.