Technology

Goals

The overall goal is to develop an application that is easily manageable by non-professional IT staff and which does not require any programming skills to maintain. The goals of the technical side of the project are highlighted in the following list of keywords:

• Easily manageable
• Portable
• Not dependent on expensive, specialized software
• Multilingual
• Rapid population of data

Pilot application

For the piloting application, the CountrySTAT team used PC-Axis (a Scandinavian software package) as a core statistical publication tool.  The aim was to build around and customize the px-web application to the needs of CountrySTAT.  This approach has several advantages:

Px-Web has been used for several years in many countries throughout the world with good results.  The application is not dependent on databases in any way.  It is written in ASP 3.0,  thus, it can be hosted by variety of Web servers.  The application uses structured text documents, called px-files, which make it easy and straightforward to structure FAOSTAT data into it.  Additional benefits of using px-files as a core data structure are:  C ountries using Px-Web and related software work closely on development and changes on the software and data structure.  The reference group ensures that development is continuous and knowledge and professional expertise are shared by many users and institutions.

A ready-made Windows application (PC-Axis) is available, at no extra cost, to view and analyze data.  Several programs are available to help users and statisticians alike to create and edit the px-files and to make the overall publication workflow easier.

With this in mind, the CountrySTAT team has built a pilot application around Px-Web.  As stated earlier, the goal of the team was to present the pilot countries with an easy to use application that required no programming or expert knowledge to master and maintain.

For maintaining and editing the application, the team developed tools in MS Excel as well as VB-scripts. 

Tools used

The application runs on a Microsoft Internet Information Server or any server handling ASP 3.0.  In addition, the application needs dlls specific for Px-Web. If the map functionality of the application is to be used, Px-Map must be installed on the server.

Languages parameters are changed by using MS Excel.  The application is complete with a number of VB-Scripts which automate maintenance.

In addition, the team intends to introduce software developed by members of the Px-Web reference group.  These include mainly specific software to create, edit and view px-files.