This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The "Geolinking Service SoRa" research data infrastructure helps to close a gap in the German research landscape. Many questions—such as those regarding social inequality or environmental justice—can only be answered through interdisciplinary analyses, such as linking social science and spatial science data: Does the proportion of green space in a residential neighborhood affect health and well-being?
Are people who live in single-family homes happier than residents of densely built-up urban neighborhoods? How does transportation infrastructure—such as access to buses and trains—influence people's mobility patterns? To answer such questions, we need, on the one hand, survey data on life satisfaction or people's political attitudes, such as that collected by the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
On the other hand, geographic data that provides information about the characteristics of residential neighborhoods and other spatial conditions is needed. Linking these different types of data from the social, economic and spatial sciences has so far been a very laborious process. Technical, institutional and data protection challenges stand in the way: To protect the privacy of respondents, the addresses of surveyed households are not disclosed; their processing is only possible in specially secured environments provided by research data centers (FDZ) that meet the highest data protection standards.
Added to this are heterogeneous data formats and interfaces, a lack of standardization in data and processing procedures, and various data holders with differing responsibilities. Furthermore, the linking and analysis of survey and geodata require specialist knowledge—such as the use of geographic information systems—which only a few researchers in the social sciences possess. This is where the "Geolinking Service SoRa" comes in: The service supports its users at every stage of the process, from selecting suitable survey and geodata, through linking the data sets, to analyzing the linked data.
In doing so, it relieves researchers of virtually all the technical work involved in handling and linking data. SoRa currently offers access to SOEP survey data, census data and the geodata from the Monitor of Settlement and Open Space Development (IOER Monitor). The service also integrates official geodata from the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG).
A user-friendly search function helps users select suitable data sets and methods, while an integrated service converts address lists into coordinates. To ensure that results remain traceable and reproducible, SoRa automatically documents which data, methods and settings were used for each linkage. Another advantage of the service is that, in order to test in advance whether the planned linking of data is relevant to one's own research question, geodata and linking methods can be used in "Public Mode" from home or from one's own research institution.
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