Description
Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) is an important step of the official statistics business architecture and harmonisation of practices has proved to be key element of quality of the output. In this spirit, since the 90s, Eurostat has been playing a role in the promotion, development and maintenance of a free software solution (argus) for SDC in line with established best practices.
In 2014 the argus software (mu-argus and tau-argus) was given a Java GUI and was officially ported to Open Source.
Since 2005 some R packages have been developed to apply SDC methods to official statistics as well: sdcMicro (and sdcMicroGUI) and sdcTable.
Recently, Eurostat launched a Specific Grant for the user support on and maintenance of SDC tools. The idea of this project is to decide upon the underlying methodology for the methods available through both interfaces: the argus GUIs and the R-packages.
At the GitHub page https://github.com/sdcTools repositories are set up with the sources of the tools. Moreover, a repository is set up specifically for UserSupport: https://github.com/sdcTools/UserSupport/wiki.
Features
The methods underlying the SDC software need to be maintained and should communicate smoothly with both the argus GUIs and the sdc R-packages. Moreover, a user community has te be set up.
Get involved
At the GitHub page https://github.com/sdcTools repositories are set up with the sources of the tools. Moreover, a repository is set up especially for UserSupport: https://github.com/sdcTools/UserSupport/wiki. We will provide further information on the user community (SDC Users Group) as soon as it becomes available. Contribution to the development of the software will be done through the GitHub repositories. You can ask to become a member of one of the teams of the sdcTools organisation on GitHub. To be updated on future developments, please subscribe to the mailinglist: sdcTools
Public administration reference
SDC software is used by many National Statistical Institutes (like Statistics Netherlands, Statistics Finland, Destatis, INSEE...), by Eurostat, by national banks and by other public bodies.