Karr, Alan F. National Institute for Statistical Sciences
Digital Government: A Web-Based Query System for Disclosure-Limited Statistical Analysis of Confidential Data
Working with several Federal statistical agencies, this grant will address an important topic for Federal statistical agencies. As part of their missions, these agencies collect a great deal of microdata (data related to an individual or particular business); this data must remain confidential. Thus, only aggregated microdata is provided publicly. However, the aggregation process reduces much of the value of the microdata for deriving knowledge to be used in research, policy and commercial purposes, so there is a balancing need to provide as much data as possible. What is proposed here is a large-scale system which tracks the history of provision of derived data and which "understands" and can quantify the potential for working backward from the derived data of confidential microdata.
