Web service support for collaboration between demographers

Abstract

The paper promotes the use of novel Web services in the daily work and research of social scientists and other professionals. The case presented in the paper pertains to demographers and their research, but the technology used is generic and can be easily instantiated for use by other social science researchers. Specifically, the case covers facilitating collaboration between a university research group in the field of demography and professionals in the field of demographic statistics. The technology used is a set of new Web services developed as parts of an EU research project. The paper explains the case itself and the motivation for using the services, describes the services themselves, and discusses the experience acquired and the benefits and lessons learned by using the services so far.