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STANDARDS AND CLASSIFICATIONS

OBJECTIVES

The Standards and Classifications program aims to facilitate the comparability, integration, coherence and quality of ABS statistics by providing conceptual and infrastructure support and through the adoption of standard concepts, definitions, classifications, and procedures.

The program aims to support the statistical collection process, mitigate statistical risk, enhance capability, and provide statistical information management leadership to the statistical community. The program seeks to achieve this by: setting and reviewing ABS policies and principles for key statistical collection methods, standards and classifications; providing leadership and support to subject matter areas on the implementation of key standards, practices and procedures; and building capability in standards, concepts and classifications within the ABS and National Statistical Service.

OUTPUTS

The key outputs and activities of the program are:

• development and maintenance of key national standards on statistical units, concepts, definitions, questions and classifications that underpin population, social, economic and environmental statistics
• support for the Statistical Business Transformation program to improve statistical coherence and metadata governance
• support to build capability in subject matter areas in the use and/or development of statistical collection methods, standards and associated tools for their implementation
• maintenance and improvement of automated coding facilities and coding indexes.

• develop, in partnership with methodology and statistical areas, the ABS's future coding strategy - due December 2015
• review the demographic, occupation, qualification and industry coding indexes in the lead up to the 2016 Census - due June 2016
• influence international developments regarding the interoperability of geospatial and statistical metadata standards and their use in international statistical infrastructure and process standards - due December 2016
• review labour force standards - due June 2017
• contribute to the international review of the standard industry classification - ongoing
• support, through the Statistical Business Transformation program, transformation of statistical metadata content - due June 2018
• review family related standards, household income and housing standards, ancestry and citizenship standards - due June 2018
• promulgate, and increase awareness of, relevant standards for population, social, economic and environmental statistics - ongoing.