Since 2008, work on GEODE has been funded as part of the DAMES ('Data Management through e-Social Science') research Node based at the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow. This ESRC research Node is part of the UK's National Centre for eSocial Science. Previously, the GEODE project was funded 2005-7 by an ESRC grant within the 'Small Grants in eSocial Science' scheme.
The GEODE project is concerned with the technologies behind the distribution of ‘occupational information’ within the social science research community. Occupational information refers to summary statistics and data which are associated with particular occupational positions. Such information is used by many social research projects, but is not always available in an easily accessible form. The GEODE project makes extensive use of occupational information provided via the CAMSIS project (see in particular the CAMSIS project's 'occupational classifications' page, which, in time, the GEODE project will supersede). However it also collates occupational information from other resources.
The GEODE project is an attempt to use ‘eScience’ and ‘Grid’ technologies to facilitate access to occupational information. These technologies involve a particular form of (newly emerging) computing resource – indeed, a wider intention of the project is to develop and promote these technologies as examples of ‘eSocial Science’. This aspect of the project involves collaborations with the UK's National e-Science Centre (see summary) and with the ESRC's National Centre for eSocial Science.
The project has two main aims. The first is to develop an online 'portal’, which will allow social science users access to the occupational information resources indexed by GEODE. One feature of this is an 'occupational matching' facility which allows users to securely submit their datasets (such as survey data with occupational records), and have the data returned with appropriate occupational information (such as social class classifications) matched to the relevant cases. The second aim is to develop an online environment to act as a ‘depository’ for occupational information, for use by a wide range of national and international social science researchers.
Some slides introducing the activities of the project are available here: either in Adobe pdf, or MS PowerPoint, format.
A list of publications associated with the GEODE project is available at this website.
Occupational Information Portal
The GEODE portal provides an online environment through which social researchers can obtain and utilise occupational information resources.
To enter the portal as a 'guest':
- username: guest
- password: geode
To enter the portal with a personalised account:
- please email the GEODE project PI to request an individual account - account details will be supplied at the earliest opportunity
Entering the GEODE portal requires either 'guest' or 'personalised' login details. Guest users may use all services except for the facilities to deposit their own occupational information data at GEODE. Users with personalised accounts have the additional facility to deposit data to the GEODE server. Usually, it will be adequate to enter the portal as a guest.
Some comments on using the GEODE portal [March 2009]:
- First access was on 25th October 2006
- An update to the server was implemented on 20th March 2009 (including a change to the uri from which the portal is accessed).
- Help on using the portal is available from links within the portal, and from GEODE project technical papers 1 and 2
- Health warning 1: Some facilities in the portal are still in development and are not especially user friendly
- Health warning 2: Several users have reported long delays in running processes on the portal - the server used by the portal is sometimes slow, due to high cumulative demands (sometimes the best thing to do is logout and revisit at a later date)
- Access update - a problem with the server prior to 20/3/2009 meant that many websites could (such as of Government agencies) could not access the portal due to firewall settings triggered by the portal's use of the '8080' port. Since the server revision of 20/3/2009, that error should be resolved.
The GEODE Portal: The aims of the portal are to provide an environment which allows users to:
- Search for appropriate occupational information resources
- Deposit occupational information resources into a standardised format (generating an'Occupational Information Depository')
- Match occupational data (instructions here): Use the portal to securely link social science micro-data with appropriate occupational information (e.g. a typical application would be whereby a file with occupational unit group data is linked to the portal service, allowing a range of occupationally based social classification schemes to be attached to it [file matching facilities require Java, with Web Start, (Java 2, Edition 5.0, version 1.5.0_06 or above)].
List of OUG titles. A key feature of the GEODE index service is a consistent naming convention for all possible 'Occupational Unit Group' (OUGs). On this page we present a list of all OUGs used in any resources within GEODE. This list is partly produced for our own purposes,
