LINKING SOFTWARE
The linking software chosen for use in this project was FeBRL (Christen, Churches, and Hegland, 2004). The version used was FeBRL v0.3, released under an open source licence. The ABS made considerable changes to the FeBRL software to integrate it within the ABS information technology environment and improve both capacity and performance.
The ABS also spent considerable resources to develop supporting infrastructure such as a secure remote linking environment and the Generic Clerical Review (GCR) system. The GCR is an end to end program management tool to facilitate the clerical review of linked records and efficiently manage and measure the quality of the process. The GCR incorporated customisable layouts and Work Health and Safety features, which were important given the large amount of clerical review that was undertaken.
Linking infrastructure also utilised the analytical software SAS. SAS was used to perform a number of functions, such as standardisation of variables, preparation and creation of files to be used in FeBRL and the GCR, and in the analysis of linkage results.