10/2024

After over one year since the SoRa kickoff meeting in May 2023, we are happy to share some of the main developments that have taken place in the past year. The SoRa project began with a clear goal: to establish an infrastructure that enables (social) scientists to link survey data with spatial data in a data protection-compliant manner. Using this infrastructure, future research can ask more sophisticated and interdisciplinary research questions at the intersection of the social and spatial sciences.

One of our key accomplishments has been the definition of the SoRa infrastructure's components and functions. This foundational work provides a clear roadmap for the project's development, ensuring all elements work seamlessly together. You can take a look at the component layout of the SoRa infrastructure here.

Building upon this foundation, we have come close to establishing initial working prototypes of several key APIs and services. This includes the SoRa user module, the public/private API, and the Geolinking API. These components are the central part of the SoRa infrastructure and we aim to have a working example in the following months.

In addition, we have made significant progress on the side of data protection and anonymization. The SoRa team has developed and streamlined a structural dataset based on SOEP household data. Structural datasets mirror distributions of survey data without revealing the true addresses of respondents. These datasets will be a tool for researchers to test their code setup before visiting a research data centre and using the SoRa private API.

Looking ahead, discussions are underway to explore the implementation of the SoRa private API within the secure environment of research data centres. This crucial step will allow researchers to leverage the SoRa infrastructure while maintaining the highest levels of data security. Furthermore, we've initiated discussions on the design of an R package and a Stata package. These software packages are going to be the public interface needed to interact with the SoRa API. We expect to make considerable progress on this end in the coming year.

Stay tuned for future updates as the SoRa project continues to develop!