ROME: 14 October 2011 -- If you do not mind
being used as guinea pigs for the following, please read on.
It concerns two sets of statistics that
the Salesian Congregation regularly compiles. One of these
would be known to those who attend General Chapters, since
the data are compiled on a six-yearly basis and are known in
Italian (and printed as such) as Dati Statistici.
The second set is produced annually, and would arrive in all
Houses in the form of Volume Two of the Annuario
(Year Book).
Regardless of the fact that these sets of
statistics are compiled for the Congregation's own
administrative purposes, the other reality is that the
Congregation's website www.sdb.org has needed to report the
statistics over the years as a regular feature. It has
needed to because of the volume of requests (often from
Salesian NGOs) that arrive requiring one or other statistic
- except that it has been done in what might be called the
'Noah's Ark' style in web terms! Imagine poor Noah standing
at the entrance and counting off the rabbits one by one (no,
that would be hundreds by hundreds) as they come in. Well,
that was how it was for many years on many web pages in many
languages on our website. No
longer. We have done
the obvious - we have converted Dati Statistici and
the Annuario (for this latter, only the stats at the
back of volume 2) into a single database. What that means is
that so long as the provincial secretaries have entered in
the correct data in the modules sent to them each year or
each six years, now that these are in a database, the
calculations have to be correct, and the possibilities for
extracting precise data have multiplied.
With that in mind, take a look at Statistics
- which areas do we work in? (If that link does not
work, go directly to
http://www.sdb.org/index.php?ids=9&sott=4&detsot=3&ty=2).
It goes without saying that you need to be registered with
sdb.org for you to access all the figures. These ones may
show up but others will not, if you are not registered.
Apart from the statistics you see on that page, at the top
you will see a link to a vocabulary called 'sdbstats'. This
is the heart of the whole endeavour, interestingly enough.
It provides the logic which relates the fields in the
database and which can also allow a search engine to make
inferences.
There is much more than meets the eye
here. We have added semantic tagging to all the statistics,
which means that search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing
(to name just three), are being fed with Salesian statistics
in appropriate machine and logical language that they can
understand, and which they are looking for. A web page
of statistics, just as a web page, is actually meaningless
to a search engine - it cannot make head nor tail of figures
in a table. In this case, we are assisting correct
information rather than the quantity of disinformation that
often finds its way into search engines. You can check out
this tagging if you know how to look at 'the source code' on
the web page, which you can do from any browser.
This brings into concrete existence what
the Rector Major spoke of recently in his AGC 411 Letter
when he said: "Instead of being dragged unwillingly into
the digital continent, we have a duty to be there
effectively and efficiently. Today this means, amongst
other things, taking care of meaningful structure,
introducing meaningful connections into our documents and
data. We can guide search technologies, for example, with
documents focused more on semantic structure than how
'pretty' they might need to look, and especially with
semantically prepared data. The former task belongs to
every Salesian who 'tweets', emails, or writes! The
latter, to those who have responsibility for the thousands
of Salesian websites around the world".
There is still more that can result from
this effort: we did it because we needed to do it for the
sake of the website. But now that it exists it could
be used by the Congregation as a means of collecting
accurate data - if it wishes to do so. The data that it
collects on a six-yearly basis it could now collect on a
yearly basis if it wished to. That depends on decisions that
go beyond us. But at least we can offer the possibility.
It is now time to check out from readers
how they see this effort - whether it is helpful, and how it
could be improved. This means looking at the layout of the
statistics, and the contents of the vocabulary too for that
matter. If there are statistical errors, they are unlikely
to be ours - they would be due to original errors in the
printed stats, unless we have incorrectly entered them - but
they have been checked over many times. You will note on the
left-hand side column (not currently from the English page
but from the Italian one) another page called Generale.
If you are not registered you will not be able to access
this page, but it will, in due course, give faceted access
to any combination of statistics that one might devise. It
is currently under construction so don't be too hard on it!
It may and probably will change.
Any feedback will be helpful. That's why
we have chosen to inform one region at the moment, as EAO is
one of the few regions (apart from our neighbour in South
Asia and perhaps Spain) that has a newsletter like this
which is region-wide.
