Building a Geo-portal for Enhancing Collaborative Socio-Economic Research in Wales Using Open Source Technology

THE WALES Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) is a major new collaborative socio-economic research programme involving five higher education institutions in Wales. This paper introduces the work of the WISERD data integration team and describes their plans for the development of an online geo-portal. Their aim is to support WISERD researchers by providing a framework for integrating, managing and disseminating quantitative and qualitative socio-economic data in Wales. This paper outlines the goals of this major project, discusses the concept of the WISERD geo-portal and reports on initial investigations into geo-portal development using free and open-source (FOSS) software. The paper concludes with a brief summary of the future work of the WISERD data integration team.