austraLasia #2930
 
Check out the stats

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.