ETH Travel Data Archive (ETHTDA)

ETHTDA

Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Travel Data Archive (ETHTDA) is a virtual platform for the travel data, which has been established at Institute for Transport planning and Systems (IVT) in May 2002. ETHTDA allows the end users to browse the archived travel data over the web and enables simple statistical analysis. ETHTDA provides comprehensive information on the travel data that has been developed or analysed at the IVT. The information includes details of the corresponding travel survey from which the database was derived. ETHTDA is one of the early travel data archives under Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standards. The archive is build around the NESSTAR system.

Networked social sciences tools and resources (NESSTAR)

"The Nesstar software suite is an integrated suite of products aimed at facilitating the locating and use of socio-economic, and similarly structured, data. It has been developed by the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex and by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services in Bergen building upon the R&D of the EC funded NESSTAR and FASTER projects. It allows users to browse distributed data catalogues over the Web, examine detailed information about the data (metadata), carry out simple data analysis (e.g. tabulations and graphical displays) and then download data, in whole or part, in one of a number of popular formats. The system contains registration and authentication facilities to filter access to data as necessary and a suite of data publishing and server management tools."

Distinctive Features

"The software is a particularly novel development in that it enables sophisticated data browsing tools to be seamlessly integrated into the users' desktop. It is fully based on Web technology and uses this technology to make a number of significant advances and hence distinctive product features. Chief among these is the ability to locate data elements at all levels of the codebook from sites distributed around the world. This is built upon the use of interoperability standards, including the XML syntax and the DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) standard.
A further distinctive feature is the ability to browse data interactively, thereby opening valuable data resources to a wider community. The generic data browser operates on the Web, is not tied to a particular data set, and can be fully integrated with the desktop on the one hand and this distributed 'information landscape' on the other. The user is given the ability to bookmark any of the operations within browsers, thereby enabling customisable data environments to be built up at the individual or organisational level."

Software products

"Nesstar's suite of software comes as four discrete products:
1. Nesstar Server - a specialist web server that allows the professional data provider to set up an interactive data publishing and dissemination service, viewable via Nesstar Explorer or a standard web browser.
2. Nesstar WebView - a web-based system for the dissemination of data. It can be used to view data, including tabular (cube) data, and metadata that have been published using Nesstar Publisher and made available on a Nesstar Server.
3. Nesstar Publisher - an advanced data management suite that enables the user to convert, enhance and manage data for publication to a Nesstar server. The three Data Archiving tools bundled are:

• Nesstar Publisher: This is a powerful data managing tool for preparing data and metadata for publication. All the missing metadata can be added to all the individual datasets.
• Nesstar Hierarchy Builder: It allows to form hierarchy of all the prepared datasets that were produced from a particular survey by nesting them, and enables to publish on the Nesstar Server.
• Nesstar Cube Builder: This is a powerful tool to publish multi-dimensional data."

Archived data at ETHTDA

There are significant number of archived datasets in ETH Travel Data Archive (ETHTDA). All the interested individuals are requested to browse our data archive catalogue.

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